


Mind the Gap

by sweetcupncakes



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, Character Development, Child Abuse, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Smut, Friendship/Love, Holmes Brothers, Introspection, John is a Very Good Doctor, M/M, POV First Person, POV Sherlock Holmes, Parent Death, Pining Sherlock, Suicidal Thoughts, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Vulnerable Sherlock, victor trevor is a bastard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-01 07:43:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 45,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetcupncakes/pseuds/sweetcupncakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An introspective journey through the life and relationships of Sherlock Holmes. </p><p>"I can hear the bones hum beneath pale and freckled skin, this sack that holds my form together. Bits and pieces that start at the bottom and end at the top, hiding the blood, muscle, fat. Cells, knit together, constantly in motion. They'll live and die, and replicate, until total equilibrium is met."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Dirt, the Worms

**Author's Note:**

> **Trigger Warnings for child abuse/domestic abuse and implied sexual abuse**
> 
> Written pre- season 3, where Sherlock's parents seem delectably lovely. 
> 
> As tagged... Canon Divergence.
> 
> Enjoy!  
> \------------------------------------------------------------

  
**_Eight_ **

The morning brings evidence of an impending gale.  The world is overcast, by noon the sky is an insidious shade of slate that bring sheets of rain.  I stay in my room.  Father is home.  I should be all right here, I locked the door.  The exchange of lightning and thunder frightens me, it shouldn’t, statistically speaking, but still it does, and I wish Mycroft or Mummy would come upstairs.  The duck pond pushes past its boundary, brown water lapping into white caps.  Just beyond, I watch the weeping willow.  Its  branches coil and unfurl, lashing out like futile arms against the wall of wind as if to hold it back, and only finding the intangible, and untouchable.  They rage all the more in spite.

The wind and rain are beating themselves against the window. Everything from the outside, always trying to push, push, force its way inside. Everything in the world wants to find its home inside of me, twist around every organ like a cancer. It wants to eat me alive, make me beg. There will be only bones left.  

We go out to explore the grounds the morning after, and it is there we discover the tiny creature.  Mature feathers have begun to develop, streaks of vivid blue peak out at the wingtips.  It barely moves, the narrow chest clenching as if it’s choking on the air it drags into its lungs.

 

“ _Garrulus Glandarius_.” 

“Another name for a colorful crow,” Mycroft amends, eager to condescend.

“Eurasian Jay,” I bite out, “It must have fallen from the willow.”  I reach to pick it up, ants have already made their way to its eyes.  I blow at them, they scatter on my palm.  

“Sherlock, if you touch it, you won’t be able to return the creature to the nest.  The mother will discern your scent, and reject it accordingly.”

“I’m not returning it.  It’s going to die anyway.”

It expires within moments, as if waiting for a touch of warmth to acknowledge its inevitable demise.  Snuffed out before it had a chance.

 

We find an old biscuit tin and bury it at the base of the willow, I dig it up a couple of weeks later out of curiosity.  By now the small muscles have peeled away only to show the discolored ossein.  

Someone will come for mine too, someday.   My bones.  Brown and brittle, like the skeleton of a baby bird.

I can hear the bones hum beneath pale and freckled skin, this sack that holds my form together. Bits and pieces that start at the bottom and end at the top, hiding the blood, muscle, fat. Cells, knit together, constantly in motion. They'll live and die, and replicate, until total equilibrium is met.

I wash my hands in the duck pond, watch as my reflection trembles and disappears when I bend over to touch it.  

I read in a book that Jays typically form monogamous pair bonds for the span of their lives.  They work in unison to feed their offspring, position their tiny bodies over the unhatched eggs to keep them safe and warm.  Fascinating.

 

\- - - - -  

 

The dead bird interests me.  Mycroft tells me that this is _"inappropriate for an eight year old child_."  But he doesn’t stop me from dissecting a worm.  I’d like something larger, but I won’t feel guilt over a worm.   I dig it up from Mummy’s vegetable garden, bring it to the veranda and pin it to a barrel with sewing needles.  I can smell the summer in my hair, feel the humidity between my fingers. I carry a paring knife I pinched from the block, it’s small and should do well enough.  The worm is still alive, squirming up and down on the pinpricks.  I suppress it the best I can, set the blade to work.

“Do you think that's his stomach?”  Mycroft asks mildly, looking over my shoulder.  

“I didn’t research the anatomy beforehand, I can’t be sure.  Everything looks like wet dirt.”  

“It’s an earthworm, what did you expect.”  

 

I don’t know.

 

The worm is cut and open, it bleeds a bit. My curiosity wins out over guilt. Children, we don't understand the value of life.

When I’m finished the ants will come and devour the once writhing body.

White towels and bed linens catch in the breeze, drying cloth still carrying traces of detergent.  The air smells like lavender.  I hear the line bow and grow taut with the sway of billowing sheets.

There’s approximately three hours of daylight remaining.

I wash my hands in the kitchen and walk the 25 steps upstairs it takes to get into my room.  I find a _European Spectroscopy_ journal propped up on my pillow with a beginner chemistry set.  I assume it’s Mycroft’s subtle way to deter me from leaving the dead corpses of yard creatures about.  " _It would upset Mummy,_ " I can hear him say.  But Mummy doesn’t speak much, anymore.

 

\- - - - -

_**Twelve** _

__

I hear him downstairs, yelling.  I slam my body down onto the bed, wrap a pillow around my ears.  Glass shatters somewhere below me.  

I feel, rather than hear, the door opening, my body goes immediately tense.  I loosen my grip on the pillow.  Judging from the gait and pressure of each footfall, it’s Mycroft.  He’s always been at least 4 stone heavier than me.  I relax minutely, and I sit up to look at him.  He crouches against the bookcase, leans his head against it, looking at the ceiling.  He doesn’t favor me, maybe a bit in the eyes and hands.  He is equal parts father and mother.  I hardly look like anyone at all.  

I climb out to the foot of the bed, wrap my arms around my knees.  I’ve begun lengthening out, all bones and joints and angles.  I wake in the night with growing pains.

I hear another dull thud come from below, my sympathetic surge of adrenaline turns me jittery and my fingers twitch.  

“They’re rowing again.”  I say it, as if it isn’t obvious.

 Mycroft rolls his eyes.  He’s back off to Oxford soon, it’s summer holidays.  He won’t be back again, not for a long time.  His loyalty to his ambition is greater than his loyalty to me.  He’s taken up smoking, there are smudged flecks of ash on the cuff of his sleeve, the acrid odor of his last cigarette clinging to his skin.  Otherwise, he’s more difficult to read, unlike others.  We fight constantly.  It doesn’t matter that I’m 12 to his nineteen.   Intellect versus intellect, two like poles on a magnet.  Different only in the sense that he can manipulate anyone to his will, he eases like an eel in the water in and out of society. I have little care for such trivialities, I repel indiscriminately.

“Yes, well.  That’s hardly new, is it?”  

The air turns quiet.  No noise above or below.  It rings in my ears, and I hate it.  A door closes down the hall, father drinking in his study.  Mummy’s useless weeping, bleeding through the cracks in the floors.  

 

“I wish he was dead.”  

Mycroft’s blue-green eyes whip up and level at mine, eyeing me critically.  “Do not say such things, Sherlock.”  

I’m shaking, I don’t realise I’m doing it, why.  “He frightens me.”

“Sherlock..” he warns me.

“You don’t know, you’re never here,” I hiss at him, somehow managing to sound both quiet and hysterical, “You don’t see how he looks at me.  He’s waiting.”  

“Don’t be absurd.”  Mycroft looks away, disgusted.  We don’t talk about this.  We never speak out loud about the things that happen just under our feet, in our home.

 

I’m sorry. _I’m sorry_. Please, look at me.  Someone look at me, kindly.  No one really does.  It’s always me, seeing everyone else.  I reflect outward, a mirror that shows everyone everything they don’t like about themselves.  No one looks at me.  Maybe I want it that way.  (Do I want it that way?)  I think I might go mad.  The tick of the clock sounds like a hammer in my head, there’s a dead beetle on the cracked white paint of the windowsill, my linens smell like lavender, it’s exactly half 11, everything is shouting at me, and it’s loud, it’s so...

“Stop it!”

Mycroft staggers to his feet, grasps hard at my shoulders and shakes.  I bite my tongue.  Taste blood.

“Do not do that, control yourself.”

Do what?

He presses the heels of his palms into my eyes, swipes them frantically down my cheeks.  It hurts. I hurt.  He looks at his hands before wiping them off on his trousers.  He scrubs them and scrubs them against the material, as if he has shit on them.

I lick my lips and taste salt, wetness rolls off my chin and seeps into the collar of my pyjama shirt.  Oh. Crying. Pathetic. Embarrassing.  I haven’t done that in front of anyone since I was five.  I’d broken my wrist jumping from the cover of the gazebo.  I had just wanted to see if I could.  The bone still aches when it rains.

My brother squats down to look at me, points his finger in my face as if to scold, but his eyes look frantic.

“Do not let him see you do that,” he continues to stab his finger toward my face until I nod, “Allow no one.  Not ever.”  He turns and leaves.  Leaves me alone.

 

Mummy crying.  I wish she would stop.

 

\- - -  - -

 

It’s morning, hazy gold light filters through window.  I sit up, my body’s movement disturbs the current of the lit dust moat, twirling flotsam jetsam.  I go down to the kitchen for breakfast.  Mummy sitting at the table, a cup of tea cradled in her hands, her knuckles white, she looks at nothing.  Her eyes are open, but she stares through me completely.  She grips the china cup like it’s the only thing tethering her to earth.  I peer at her while I segment an orange, my thumb stings as citric acid seeps into the paper cut I acquired yesterday.  Someone (Mycroft, likely) saw to it that she showered and dressed.  Her ginger blonde hair covers the sweep of her cheeks, but I see it.  The contrast between sallow skin to the dark patch at the crest of her cheekbone.  Contusion.  From the size and minimal swelling: Open fist.

My skin burns and burns.  I purse my lips.  

“Mother,” I call out to her.  She doesn’t even blink.  

“Mum.” I say it louder and she stares through me like a specter.  

She would cook strawberry crepes for me on Sundays.  I’d watch as she dipped the ladle into the thin batter, pour it into the hot pan, spreading it to the edges.  The first attempt always resulted in a broken crepe when flipped.  A sacrifice in order to remind her muscles of the proper technique required.  We would share the limp disk of broken dough, it tasted faintly of madagascar vanilla.  She would make coffee in the french press and give me a cup, then add heaping spoonfuls of sugar, turning the substance into something more akin to a syrup.  I wouldn’t drink it otherwise.  I was seven and thought coffee was disgusting.  I oversaw the crepe filling.  Marscapone cheese, icing sugar, crushed basil, a teaspoon of lemon juice.  I’d whisk until it all became fluffy and homogenous, flecks of green herb strewn throughout.  She chopped the strawberries, then folded them into mixture.

Then suddenly, it all stopped.  I’ve never figured out why.  

 

How delicate the balance must be, that things, so abruptly, turn bad.

 

I go over to her, put my hand on her shoulder.  My fingers are long and spidery.  She still won’t look at me.  I brush a thumb over the bruise, she doesn’t even flinch.  So I kneel, duck my head into her lap as I would do when I (rarely) got sick.  She’d pet my wayward curls, and sing Le Petite Poule Grise to me.  A silly French lullaby about hens, of all things.  But it was beautiful, when she sang.  I rub my cheek on her leg.  She doesn't smell like vanilla and the vegetable garden anymore.  It's been replaced with the scent of something barely clean, unfamiliar.  I want to say something awful, to yell and thrash and scream to be seen.  I don’t do it.  

“Please, please..”  I don’t even know what I’m begging for.

I stand and walk out.  She won’t even notice I’ve gone.

 

\- - - - -

Mycroft goes back to Oxford.  I can’t wait to leave too.  I’m also afraid to leave.  I dread it and yearn for it in mutuality.

\- - - -

 

I observe the chemical reaction when a drop of sulfuric acid is added to potassium chlorate and sucrose, I set it aflame.  

I observe it in my father’s study, on his 1,200 quid Persian rug.

I burn a hole in the silk.

I leave all the evidence.  I go to my room, play my violin, and wait.

 

\- - - -

 

It’s night time, dark, before he finds the mess.  Mummy took her pills earlier, she’s been asleep since twilight.  I hear his footsteps down the hall.  He’s had at least 3 glasses of scotch, I can hear it in the slight drag of his feet.  Not a shuffle, not a deliberate pace.  I sit and wait.  I don’t care.  

He’s in front of my door now.  I could have locked it.  Usually do. The shrill twist of the door knob, the easy give of the latch.  I stay quiet.  

And then he’s right there, his hand snatching into my hair and he drags me to the floor.  He’s saying things, cursing me, but it barely registers over the roar of blood in my ears. My breath escapes me in a rush and my instincts give in to the automatic urge to struggle and fight back.  I strike out with a knee, and it connects with his solar plexus.  

“You shit!  You little bastard!” He spits at me, he grabs my hair again, bringing my head up, only to smash it back down into the floor with tremendous force.  I see spots, they make holes in my vision.  I can’t see which way I need to roll to minimize damage.  He stands up, I turn to my side to follow, but my ribs show and he’s kicking.  And kicking.  And cursing.  And I try not to make much noise, because if he’s kicking me, he isn’t hitting her.  

Then it stops.  He’s still there.  He stays and stays, waiting for me to get up.  His respiration rate is 37 breaths per minute.  Mine is 42.  

Minutes pass, approximately four minutes, I count them off in my head like a stopwatch.  He kneels down beside me, I flinch when his hands touch down on my hips.  He grasps lightly, trying to tug me up.

“Come on, dear boy.  Up you go, back to bed.”  His voice is light, the indulgent tone of a loving father.  Words slur just around the edges.  It confuses me. I stir, turn my face to pant and wince as I twist against the sharp ache in my ribs.  He doesn’t let go of my hips.  He pushes in at the fingertips, when I stand.  My room is dark, but I still can’t stomach the thought of turning to look at him, his pond-muck brown eyes.  I climb into bed, turn my back.  Arrange my aching body to huddle inward on itself.  

He sits down beside me, stroking the hair at the nape of my neck.  Pets my head.  I pretend to be asleep.  If he thinks me unconscious, perhaps he’ll leave.  His breathing turns heavy, even though he’s hardly moving.  I don’t want to consider why.  I want to cringe, I want to bolt. The best I can manage is a wretched tremor.

I’m churning, doddering.   Fingers brush up my leg, up, up, up, and push under my shirt.  Just a thumb circling the skin at the small of my back.  My skin corrodes under his caress.   

I’m confused, it’s overriding the fear.  My stomach turns, I choke back the bile rising in my esophagus.  I’m locked onto the bed, dull embroidery sewn onto a sheet, equally as worthless.

Mother painted the walls a hideous mint green when I was five, now they stare at me blankly, demanding my silence.  Moonlight passes through the window.  My hands are corpses attached to my wrists.  

Hot puffs of breath against my neck.  The reek of stale alcohol. I don’t know why he’s still here.  No.  I push my mind back out.  I try not to count how many times I can feel my chest rise and fall.  Rise and fall.  

I count by doubles in my head.  Falter.  Restart.  Review the properties of diatomic nonmetals.  

Creak of a bedspring.  Thumb rubbing the same spot on my back, over and and over.  I focus on a crack in the ceiling plaster.  The cobweb covering it.  I think of mummy, asleep on the chaise longue.  A lullaby about hens, her clear mezzo-soprano.  

##### La petite poule grise

##### Quallait pondre dans l'église

##### Pondait un petite coco

##### Que l'enfant mangeait tout chaud

 

His circling thumb burning its pattern into me.  It’s nothing deliberate, but I’m afraid all the same.  My thoughts don’t orient themselves properly.  This is nothing at all, and something terrible, simultaneously.

Whatever foulness he carries inside of himself, it reaches out to me, it calls to me and seeks to own me. I remember the dirt and worms of that summer, I wonder if this is how they felt. Taken apart, dismembered. I feel ashamed of the openness.  

He shifts behind me, I hear a garbled noise emitted from the back of his throat.  He gets up, walks out of my room.  I hear the open and close of his study where he’ll sleep.  I lie trembling, adrenaline and disgust mixing inside of me like a poisonous blender drink.  When it crests, I propel myself from the bed, tear the linens from the mattress.  I want to go downstairs to burn them in the fireplace.  I want to set everything on fire.  Everything he’s ever touched.  Watch as sheets, and chandeliers, and sofas, and skin, crumple into decalescent embers.  Watch when my own flesh peels away from bones in flaking cinders.

I reach for anger, touch hate, and find myself firmly seated in ambivalence.  

I stand motionless for a long time.  An hour.  Retreat inside myself.  Try and try to lock the door to the memory, destroy it altogether, but it resists every effort.

I go to my door, peer out into the hallway, tip toe to the bathroom.  Turn the water on as hot as it will go and stand underneath the stream.  I scrub and scrub the spot on my back with the coarse side of a cleaning sponge.  I don’t stop until I rub the skin raw, until I see dark red against the green fibers of the sponge.

I step out of the shower, the humidity compresses my chest.  I wipe the condensation off the mirror and look at the reflection.  My hair is soaked flat and black, my usually pallid skin burned red from the over-heated water.  I make eye-contact with myself, the ever shifting pigment of the iris looks almost translucent.  I stare until I see indifference weave into the set of my brow, the corners of my mouth.  Unreadable, once again.  

I leave the boy with the haunted eyes there in the bathroom, bury him.  I marry myself to apathy.

Maybe they’ll come for my bones.  Because they always come for your bones.  Here and there, picking and pulling until there’s nothing left.  Nothing left except for the dirt and the worms.

 

\- - - - -

 

Every night I wait for him to come back.  I sleep with a pocket knife under my pillow.  He never returns.  Pity.

  
\- - - -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the youtube link to La Petite Poule Grise, the song mummy Holmes would sing to Sherlock. (Technologically inept, and highly likely you'll have to copy and paste said link.)
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYi-FP_kgrI
> 
> Also, though it is never spoken aloud by Sherlock, it is indicated that Mummy Holmes suffers from mental health issues, particularly deep-seated clinical depression, and anxiety, exacerbated by a domestically abusive spouse. Mycroft likely has been taking on the role of care-giver to Sherlock for some time now, with both brother's stepping up to take care of Mummy since the melancholia brought about by her mental illness leaves her nearly unable to care for herself.


	2. Funeral

\- - - -

_**Thirteen** _

 I will be off to the boy’s academy in a month, at the start of term.  Mycroft sends a train ticket, I’m to go to London.  I sit alone on the train, a female member of the wait staff tries to talk to me as if I’m some simple child.  

“Would you like something to drink, dear?  We have some apple juice in the cooler.”  She asks me.  She has skin the color of cinnamon and red lips.  Pretty, by normal standards.  I could care less about aesthetics.  I’m more interested in the cream coloured hairs that cling to the lap of her skirt.

“You ought to spay your cat,” I tell her.  Her head cocks a little in confusion, I roll my eyes.  “Himalayan, is it?  Yes, I think so.  Judging from the texture and length of the coat hairs.”

“How did you..?”  

“Of course if you neutralize the creature, it’s still likely it will continue to urine mark its territory.  It’s only a theoretical deterrent.”

“Mark what..?”  

This female must be incapable of finishing her sentences.

“Mark you.  You reek of cat piss.”  

 

Her mouth opens and shuts like a fish out of water, her eyes wide and affronted.  She huffs at me, and turns on her heel.  I see her sniffing the collar of her shirt as she leaves, confirming my deduction.  I shrug, press my head into the window.  I was only telling her the truth, is that not the kinder thing?   Would it have been better to allow her to wander about, incognizant to the fact that she puts off the odor of feline urination?  I’d rather know, if our positions were switched. My hair makes scratching sounds at being pinned between scalp and slick glass.  We are passing through the countryside, I see the cobbled walls of a dilapidated cottage, white feverfew blooming aimlessly at the base.  I hate the country.

 

No one else tries to speak to me.  It’s boring.  I’m thirsty.

 

\- - - - - -

 

Mycroft is busy with his internship.  I  search his flat, it’s completely utilitarian.  He’s engaging in intercourse with a girl, it seems.  (Shudder at the thought.)  Brunette, long hairs on a pillowcase, I can smell her perfume in the bathroom.  Jasmine and apples.  It’s too delicate, I hate it, my nose pricks at the scent.  Peach lipstick (garrish) blotted against tissue and discarded in the bin by the toilet.  Mycroft is on a diet again, I smirk at the knowledge.  His crisper is full of colorful vegetables, bottled water on the shelves.  I play Caprice No.5 by Paganini on my Stradivarius.  I lean into the notes.

I leave his flat, it doesn’t matter that I’m a 13 year old boy walking alone on the gritty streets of London.  No one as much as looks at me.  I do love it here, though.  The constant influx of information, the fuliginous cover of smog, everything begging me for attention.  I find a cafe, settle at a small table with a cheese sandwich and a weak cup of coffee.  I watch people sit and eat:  Widow with three children, works at a pub to make ends meet.  Investment banker, embezzling funds.  A man meeting a high end prostitute.  My game grows dull, for a moment I wish I had someone to talk to.  I stand and leave.

Mycroft is back at his flat when I return, he’s reading Tolstoy in a Queen Anne chair.  Pretentious.  He merely looks up to regard me with nebulous disinterest, as if I’ve interrupted him, the bastard.

“Tolstoy?  I never figured you the anarcho-pacifistic type.”  He has a mug of tea sitting on the coffee table beside him.  I take the steaming thing for myself.  He doesn’t even blink.

“I’m not,” he confirms, lackadaisical, “I trust you found your way around London safely.”  

“I memorized the map on the train.”

He nods.  It’s not odd for him to hear such things.  We both have the advantage of an eidetic memory.

 

“What’s her name?”

He looks back up to me from his book, “Pardon?”  

“The girl you’re fucking.”

He gives a long-suffering sigh, “Your use of colloquial terminology is charming.”  I narrow my eyes and smirk at his annoyance.  “Rebecca.”

Unremarkable.  “Will you marry her?”  I ask him, casually.  I know he holds no value for the institution.

“I suppose.  If she comes to expect it.” He sniffs.

We order Indian takeaway, we eat and play chess.  He beats me, and I sulk for a moment.  He goes to bed, and I sleep on the sofa.  The flat is dark except for the light above the kitchen stove.  I don’t care to sleep, but the sounds of passing cars and tapping footsteps against damp pavement lure me down.  

 

\- - - - -

 

_Gold light filtering through a crack.  I can see his face, like it’s been drawn right in front of me.  Ravenous, gleaming.  A mouth stinking of alcohol.  The room is full of water, and I’m drowning.  A creak of bedspring, fingers like knives, they cut across my hips.  I call out, but my mouth is full of dirty water.  There are fish swimming.  Swimming.  Drowning. I look at them, reach out to them.  They bite._

 

_A thumb rubbing a circle on my back.  I thrash, but my arms are slow in the water.  My feet ensnared in mud, I can’t run.  I can’t kick and flail and---_

 

_“Sherlock.”_

 

A hand on my shoulder.  Oh God.  He found me.  He followed me here.  

“Sherlock!”

I bolt upright, and shove as hard as I can, I connect with sternum, the hand is ripped from my shoulder.  I scramble off the couch, only for my legs to give out and fall on the floor.  I look for him, but I’m staring at Mycroft.  He’s on the floor too, knocked up against the coffee table.  His eyes are panicked and opened too wide.  My breath stutters, I scrub a hand through my hair, willing the shaking to stop.  We breathe, and say nothing for a long time.

“You were calling out.”  He swallows and stares at me, observes me.  I try to school my face back into obscurity, and the very act gives me away.  I see anger, then horror, guilt, pity, it all flits by so quickly across his face.  I resent it.  I don't want any of it.

“You ought to have told me,” his voice comes out as a whisper.

“It doesn’t matter.”  I snarl at him.

“I honestly didn’t think he would--”

And then I’m shouting at him, “Shut up!  I said it doesn’t matter, just shut up.”  He doesn’t move, just stares, reading me all too easily. “Go on, leave me be!”

His jaw clicks shut, he gets up and leaves back off to this bedroom.  He keeps his door open, and turns on the light.  I assume he’s reading Tolstoy again.  I pick up my violin and saw away at it, it’s not even music, what I’m doing.  I keep up the plaintive notes until he shuts off the light and closes the door.

 

\- - - - -

 

I leave for academy.  Mummy kissed my cheeks after I’d gathered my things, father was away on business .  I want to leave.  It still feels like I’m being sent away.  I’m rude and odd, and everyone is relieved to be rid of me.  I don’t care.  

I get in a fist fight the first night at the dormitories after identifying a third year as having a late-adolescent habit of bed wetting.  I wondered if he could explain the psychology behind the ordeal.  Apparently not.  I don’t know why people are so offended by simple facts.  They should do better to conceal themselves.  No faculty is around to see the brawl, I end up with a split lip, my elbow earns the other boy a black eye.  I tell no one of the debacle, and no one asks.  

Other students pick up a habit of attempting to bait me with name-calling.  My disregard frustrates them even further.  I learned to ignore verbal taunts years ago, they take my disdainful silence as a challenge.  These confrontations sometimes give way to physical attacks, which I prefer.  Sometimes it’s nice to set fists to flesh.  I’m taken to the Headmaster often for the ensuing fights, but my scores are impeccable enough to avoid expulsion.  

I keep squarely to myself.  I watch everyone.

I  don’t often go home on holidays.  I take a train to London, stay at Mycroft’s flat, though he’s rarely there, and I never stay in either.  I walk the streets, disappear.  I come back smelling like cigarettes and the stale alleyways I’ve crept down.  I suppose it’s dangerous, but I only suppose.  

 

\- - - - -

_**Seventeen** _

__

“Sherlock Holmes, your presence is required .”

Roll my eyes, I’m in the middle of an exam for god's sake, “Busy.”  The entire classroom’s attention darts over to me.  Probably wondering if I’ve gotten caught pinching Hypophosphorous acid from the lab.  Again.  (How else am I meant to observe electroless plating?)

“You may finish it later, follow me, sir.”

I walk behind the man, he isn’t a faculty member.  He’s dressed in a navy suit, his black shoes are polished and uncuffed. Young, typically an office worker, but he’s far from his desk now, so courier of some sort.  Internship.  Likely.  He turns back to me to make sure I’m following, I see his eyes slip down then back up appraisingly.  He catches my eyes, I lift a brow in acknowledgement and he quickly faces forward once again.  Closeted homosexual, then.  

I’ve been noticed for my physicality before, by girls in our village, the occasional admiring male.  At fifteen I was tall, ungainly, an unwilling passenger in an awkward body.  Age sixteen eased the proportional oddities, and now at seventeen metabolism has adjusted accordingly and my musculature corresponds more appropriately to build.  If others find my appearance desirable then so be it.  Their fantasies would soon succumb to an inevitable demise within moments of any any attempt at flirtation.  Apparently, tactless, sullen, and socially unrefined are not desirable qualities in a potential infatuate.  (My own brand of ineptitude in this area.) Anyway, trysts would be distracting and unwise within such a closed environment, and any of my hormonal urges are efficiently relieved on my own.

I nearly have it sorted out by the time he opens a door to an empty room containing stacked desks, and Mycroft in a three piece suit.  I’m only mildly surprised, it hardly registers over my more immediate annoyance.

“You look well, brother.”  Smug as ever.

“And you look like you’ve eaten your way through a Patisserie . Come to spy on me?”  I ask flippantly.  I know he has my teachers reporting to him regularly.  His place within government has expanded exponentially, despite his claims otherwise, and he’s always excelled at compelling (blackmailing) people to do his bidding.

“I hear you’ve gained early acceptance into Cambridge.  That’s excellent, isn’t it?.”  

I shrug, it’s of no consequence to me.  University is the next logical course of action, and according to my research, Cambridge would provide me with a venue conducive to my interests in forensic chemistry applications.  (Plenty of lab equipment to filch.)

“Why are you here, Mycroft?  I was busy, as I’m sure you’re aware.”  

Mycroft looks down, opens and clenches his fist around the smooth wood grain of an umbrella handle.  He looks back up to me.  The silence passing between us is thick, tangible as if I could lift my fingers and disturb the the set of it.  

 

“Mother or father?”  I ask flatly. I feel my heart rattling against my ribcage, but my voice sounds deep and even.  He continues to stare at me, considering, making his own deductions.  Whatever he is trying to intuit, I am utterly unconcerned with at the moment.

 “Who?  One of them is dead, tell me which one!”  My impatience cuts through.

“Father.”

_Oh thank God,_

"How?”

“Heart attack, it seems.”  

How mundane, how _simple_. I breathe out some hazily amused form of a snort.  I feel like I’ve gone cold.  The audible ticking of the clock keeping track of our progress, Mycroft staring at me as if he isn’t sure if he should reach out to me, or jump through the window and run away to avoid any emotional outpouring on my behalf.  He does neither.  

_tick tick tick tick_

We bear witness to one another’s uncertain relief.

 

\- - - - -

 

I sit motionless beside mother at the funeral, Mycroft occupies the space next to her left shoulder, he holds her limp hand.  Her wispy hair is streaked with grey at the temples, I try to recall when that happened.  She seems to have aged all at once.  

I loathe the church, from the stained glass with depictions of avenging angels, to the crimson aisle rug. The mahogany pew is cold against my back, even through the barrier of my black suit jacket and silk shirt.

He was cremated, the front of the sanctuary where the casket would be arranged, is empty.  I looked inside the unsealed urn where his ashes were, earlier.  I was curious what burned human remains looked like.  Fine cinders.  Black and grey bits of burned bone, some particles bigger than others.  Interesting.

 

The vicar reads of passages from the Bible.  Psalm 23.  Predictable.  Absurd.  I haven’t faith in anything.  There’s only me.

“Psalm 116:15 tells us:  Precious in the sight of the Lord, is the death of his saints.”

I wonder what Christ said about husbands that strike their wives, and fuck the nanny.  About men that go off to their very important careers, day after day, then come home at night and set hands to their children.  Does it matter, as long as they keep paying their penance to the church? Doubtful.

“...and as we grieve together, let us remember the family that has been left behind.”

Mother looks on with trembling lips, her blue eyes glistening.  Her grief infuriates me.  Why is she crying?  Will she ever stop defending him?  Stop. Just stop.

I want to leave.

“--that we may honor the memory of Crestwell Ogden Holmes.  Beloved friend, selfless philanthropist, devoted husband and father.”

It bubbles up inside me, my shoulders shake.  Mycroft looks over to me, his face an admonishing mask.  Emotions, like vomit. They knot like twine, stringing together delight, and horror, love, anger, and apathy. Until it all feels alike, and I am no longer able to distinguish the differences.

“It is comforting to remember that this is not the end, The Lord will once again reunite us in his embrace.”

A sharp gust of air released through my nose in a loud snort.  I ball my fist against my mouth, bite down and feel the hardness of the proximal phalanx underneath the skin.  People seated around us begin to glance at me nervously, unable to place my reaction.  

“And as it has been said before: _As you comprehend this profound loss, let yourself cry knowing that each tear is a note of love rising to the heavens_.”

My laughter is wrenched from me, I don’t care.  I don’t care who is watching, I don’t care what anyone thinks.  I laugh and laugh, my whole body convulses with the act, people look at me like I’m mad.

(I think I am, I think I’ve gone mad.)

Light streaming through the stained glass, it paints me shades of yellow and red.  Hilarious.  I look up, still laughing, family and acquaintances stare at me in horror.  It sends me into a fresh fit of mirth.  A firm hand digging into my bicep, tugs me upward, Mycroft.  I haven’t seen him so incensed since I scorched his coin collection in an attempt to see if the metal would melt.  

Mother is looking at me and crying in earnest, and I’m glad.  I’m glad that she’s crying, I’ve made her cry.  I’m not sorry, not at all.  Mycroft drags me into the aisle, through the alcove with the side door that leads back outside.

The sun is shining in the crystal blue sky, and I’m still laughing.  I thought funerals were relegated to dank, raining days, as if the sun would have the audacity to burn on occasions so bleak.  Mycroft pushes me, one-handed against the stones of the church, steadying me.  He’s shouting at someone on a mobile.  I’ve never seen him so uncontrolled, I giggle all the harder.  Can’t he see that this, all of this, it doesn’t matter.  He harbors no sentiment for this event either, he’s only angry because I’ve upset mummy, embarrassed him.

“You couldn’t conduct yourself for an hour?” he sneers.  Rhetorical question, obviously I couldn’t.  

“ _Each tear is a note of love, rising to the heavens_ ,” I recite the unfathomably stupid words.  “Do you think he received them?  Our notes?”

More laughter, I’m being steadfastly ignored, so I tip my face upward, yelling into the vivid expanse of azure, _“Did you, you old tosser?”_

I turn back to Mycroft, my eyes wide in their madness, “You think he heard me?  Doubtful.  Not quite the type they let through the pearly gates, I imagine.”  

Mycroft is clenching his fists, looking up and down the streets for anyone witnessing our little scene.  He looks like father right now, I soothe my voice into a purr, cock my head.

“You want to hit me, don’t you?  Yes, I see that you do.  You’re worried what people will think, how it affects their perception of you.   _Sherlock and his frustrating inability to give himself over to silence_ ,” I mock in a nasty voice.  Everything spews out of me like a festering boil, “Go ahead, big brother,” I turn my cheek, “Punch me, if you must.  After all, it’s the only proper send off for our dear father.  He’d be proud, perhaps give you that pat on the shoulder you’ve yearned for so _desperately_.”  

Mycroft face smoothes out, and he backs away from me.  That enrages me even further, I want to keep antagonizing him, “He scarcely even looked your way, did he?”  

A twitch in his jaw.

“Oh, I see now.  You’re jealous.  You resent me, because at least I had his attention in some way.  The moral ambiguity of it must really torture you,” I continue, lashing out with my trenchant words, to wound, to will him into reacting,  “He didn’t even love you well enough to beat you.”  

His face whips toward me now, but his expression is one of confident neutrality, and I hate him.

“That’s not going to work, Sherlock.”

 

I gulp air and stare into the sky.   _My_ hurt.   _My_ wretchedness.   _My_ grief.  Escaping to the surface, reaching outward as if to grasp, to infect anyone that dare come close and pull them under.  The result:  I am unshareable.   The world feels like nothing right now. (I don’t care I don’t care.)

 A black car pulls up to the curb, a man climbs out to open the door to the back seat passenger side.  (Father of two, keen angler in his spare time, interrupted during his lunch break, was in the middle of a pastrami sandwich on rye.)

“Sending me away?” I ask, amused, embittered.  Mycroft shoves me into the seat like a criminal into a patrol car; a hand pressing down the top of my skull, willing me to duck into the confines of the leather interior.  He says nothing.  I refuse to apologize.  I’m being dealt with. The door shuts and we’re driving away, I don’t look back.  I don’t ask where I’m being taken, though we are headed the wrong direction to return home.  Home.  A word with so much sentiment attached to it.  There’s a visceral ache at the core of me in its place.  Doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter.  

We are barely a kilometer away from the train station, I expect one of Mycroft’s minions will already be waiting with a ticket that will send me back to school.  I am still in the middle of sixth form exit exams, after all.  We drive past shops and schools, mothers pushing their pink, sobbing babies in carriages.  Pedestrians carrying brown bags filled with their shopping, a stray dog pissing on a flagpole.  I shut my eyes against it all.

He's dead.  

  
I don’t care.  I repeat it to myself until it sounds like the truth.  

_I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care._


	3. Controlled Descent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Looks good on you,” he uses a thumbnail to scrape at the crusted blood on my cheek. Leans over, strokes my bottom lip. Kisses me softly. He goes to get a paper napkin, holds it under the tap. He walks back over and hands me the damp thing, I wipe absently, then stand and search for the bin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Beware of terribly dubcon sex, and references to suicide**
> 
> I SWEAR, happy times are on their way.

\-----

_**Eighteen** _

__

University isn’t so very different from public school.  Not at all.  More students, surely, less uniforms, no one cares when I come and go.

Apparently no one in my dormitory appreciates their sexual history repeated back to them, if they are concerned with promiscuity perhaps they ought to discontinue their relentless shagging.  

People do not approach me after the first several months.  By the end of the first year I have only hallway acquaintances, a handful of students that come to me if they need something.  (Not tutoring, that was an unmitigated disaster.  The girl left, crying.  Honestly, is the function deubiquitinating enzymes that difficult to grasp.)  I've been offered money in exchange for completed assignments, it's lucrative enough.

 

Otherwise, I am to be avoided.  It is as if their subconscious recognizes the damage inside of me, and out of instinct, stay away.

 

It’s fine.  

\-----

 

_**Twenty-One** _

 

“We will be analysing the dye composition of synthetic fibers through the application of thin  layer chromatography.  Please find a partner and locate the materials required for the lab.”

I  go off on my own to begin the plate preparation.  Thankfully, there’s an odd number of students.  A partner would only reduce my productivity.  My reputation as a volatile helpmate proceeds me, no one attempts to annex my compliance.

I gather the standard particle size range TLC plate, locate the silica gel where the other adsorbents are stationed.  

“So, calcium sulfate, yes?”  A voice alongside me, I turn to see its owner.  Victor Trevor, graduate student assisting the professor.  I typically see him scoring our tests or assisting a group of amorous female students during labs. “That would be the best inert binder, don’t you think, Sherlock?”

“I don’t require assistance.”  Water, I need a spot of water to make the slurry.

“I’m aware, but I’m assisting anyway.”

“Why.  There are a great deal of students that are far more tragically inept.”

“Yes,” he sighs, fetches the required water and deposits it into the mix, “Not you, though.”

“Obviously.”

He laughs, it’s not a bad laugh.  He follows me to the oven where my resultant plate will dry and therefore activate, it should take nearly 30 minutes.  Our elbows brush. (Intentionally?)  Thirty minutes of tedious boredom, I’ve already completed the work everyone else wil bel catching up on while waiting for their TLC plates to develop.  Why must everything trudge forward at such a slow pace?  I could have performed this lab when I was a child.  

Bored, Bored. BORED.

“I use your tests as the key for everyone else’s.  You’re quite clever.  You disrupt the entire grading curve, it’s lovely.”

“I’m not sure everyone shares that sentiment,” I murmur,  methodically preparing my solution for when I can continue the qualitative analysis.  (Although, I do feel somewhat flattered.)  I am quite aware of my intellectual capability, it isn’t terribly rational to feel complimented.  It’s only that few people freely acknowledge it beyond their own begrudging, inferiority complexes.  

“Yes, well, a sad majority of people are incompetent fuckwits.”

“That statistic does not bode well for you.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Victor says nonchalantly.  

I look up from swirling a small amount of solvent in a glass beaker, and into amber brown coloured eyes.  Light as whiskey.  Due to the deposition of lipochrome into the iris. (Unsure why I’ve saved the specifics of polygenic phenotypic characters.)

“Chances with what?”

“That you won’t group me into the category.”

“So far you’re only moderately disruptive.   Either way my personal opinion on the matter is hardly consequential.”

He leans back against my workbench, arms folded in a casual manner across his chest.  

“I don’t know, it could be consequential, depending.”

“Depending?”

“Have coffee with me.”

Oh.  

What?

 _Oh._  

I’ve been concentrated on preparing the TLC lab, I take a moment to consider Victor instead.  Liverpool accent, living alone.  His hair is a honey brown shade that nearly matches his eyes, a swimmer’s body, approximately one centimeter taller than me.  I can understand the appreciative glances his aesthetic garners.  His pupils swell a bit under my observation.  

I see.

“You’re chatting me up.”  It’s meant to be a statement, my uncertain shock turns it into a question.

He smiles.  He didn’t have corrective braces as a child, canine teeth overlap the lateral incisors ever so slightly.  Somehow it suits him.

“Maybe.  Is it working?”

I turn back to the oven to check on my resultant plate, “Unsure.  I suddenly have concerns regarding your mental status.”   _Damn_ , the solution is still too agglutinative.

“We can discuss your concerns over coffee.”

“Why?”  I look back to Victor, surely there’s an ulterior motive hiding underneath the lovely smile.

“Because I fancy you?”

Implausible, “Why?”

He laughs again, as if it should be obvious, as if I’m the one playing coy.  

“Because you’re brilliant, and I like it.  A bit infamous, yeah, but I like that too.  Plus, you look pretty fit in that lab coat.”

I roll my eyes, and he slides the tips of his fingers under the white cotton-polyester blend of the coat, grasps the hem of the sleeve and tugs lightly.  His knuckles brush against the top of my wrist.  Willing touch.  I feel the capillary loops in my cheeks flush with a sudden influx of blood.  Vasodilation related to physical stimulus.  (Perplexing.)

“You seem confident that I’m homosexual.”

Again, a laugh, “I’ve noticed the looks of disappointment the female population sends your way.  I thought the assumption was worth the potential embarrassment.  Are you not?”

I’ve not considered my own predilections beyond basic conjecture.  A preference for males, certainly in relation to sexuality.  (Although the female mind is terribly fascinating.  I can see the appeal, there.)

“Fine.”

“Cafe on the Round?  Eight O’clock?”

“Tolerable.”  Not really, the coffee is dreadful.  Still.  

“I look forward to it,” his tanned fingers slip back from under my sleeve, “Be sure to saturate the vacuum chamber properly, wouldn’t want you to have non-reproducible results.”  

As if I would be so incompetent.  

 

\-----

 

Back shoved against a bookcase.  Hands under my coat, under my t-shirt, fingertips digging into the hollow of my hips.  Lips on my throat: Wet. Teeth at my earlobe, bite: Shudder.

(What do I do with my hands?)  Should I ask what I should do with my hands? Is that considered indelicate?  (The whole situation is indelicate.)  I’m simultaneously unsure, and curious.  Uncomfortable.  My firsthand knowledge in this department is theoretical, at best.  

Is this the order in which such engagements are supposed to progress?  We missed kissing along the way, isn’t that considered a precursor for these things?  Warning would have been helpful.  He just pulled me into his flat and pressed against me.  My brain telling me to shove him off, registering proximity as a threat to my safety.  (Years of being pinned down and beaten in public school dormitories.  Father. _Don’t think about him_.)  But the rest of my body mixes the signals.  The skin wants touch, craves the slide of another’s skin against my own.  Warmth.  Starved for it.  (Pathetic.) My body responds to the physical stimulus anyway.  Stop: Don’t Stop.  

My skin giving consent, without me.  Doesn’t wait for my mind to catch up.  

We were only just having coffee.  Victor discussing his plans to eventually work as an organic chemist in America.  (He’s clever.  Unusual.)  Me, unaccustomed to small talk.  Throughout course of conversation I insulted him three times, then proceeded to deduce any person that stepped within a five foot radius of the table. (Part of my nature.  Can’t ever stop seeing.) Also, not sure what other line of conversation is required.  

“Have you no filter?” He asked after the barista (having an affair with the married lawyer sitting in the chair to the right, against the wall) set the croissant plate down with more force than necessary.  Roll my eyes.

“Why would she be upset?  I’m hardly telling her anything she doesn’t already know.  Intimately.”  

He laughed, stroked my index finger, “Your party trick is going to earn you a shiner if you don’t shut it.  It’s a good thing you look the way you do.”  Unable to discern how to react to that statement.  An insult wrapped in a compliment, or vice versa.  Does one negate the other?  I don’t see the correlation.

“A trick would imply I am performing a deceitful act.  I’m simply observing the facts.”

“Don’t get shirty, I was only trying to help.”

I wasn’t getting shirty.  Merely correcting.

Right?

 

Coat pushed off my shoulders.  Shirt being pulled up.  I think he wants to take it off of me, I assume as much because now it’s over my eyes and I can’t see.  His flat smells like burned pizza and books.  

“Lift your arms so I can get this off,” he growls.  I comply.  Do I take his off too?  What are his expectations?  Can’t ask.  Logic at war with emotional propensity to be wanted.  (My innate loneliness, clawing its way outward)  Would be better to give myself over to it.  Reach, tug at the hem (Sudden realization of my own awkwardness.) His bare chest against mine, his hand palming me through the front of my trousers.  

And yes, there, his mouth over mine.  (Hot, tastes like a cinnamon cappuccino, the cigarette we shared)  His tongue running over my lips, I open my mouth, flick the tip of my tongue against his in mimicry.  I feel utterly inept.   

“I’d like to see your mouth around my cock, sometime.”  He notifies me casually.  As if he’s talking about the weather. (Sometime?) Am I amenable?  He bites my bottom lip.

“That’s.. nice.” My voice sounds hoarse, I’m panting.  When did that start?  Going too fast, no time to process.

His hands still on my hips.  Mine, gripping a bookcase shelf, solid wood cutting into the small of my back, I’ll have bruises.  He pulls my pelvis inward toward his own, can feel his erection through our jeans.  He ruts against me, pants humid air against my shoulder.  Friction.  Him, bending a little at the knees, aligning our hips again, thrust.

Head falls back hard against books, garbled noises escape from my throat.  

Victor’s hands on my belt, unslotting it, maneuvers his hand into the back of my trousers, under my pants, grabs my bottom.  Firm squeeze.  My hands, still frozen against the bookcase.  (Unable to reciprocate, unable to keep up.)  

“I want to fuck you,” he murmurs into my left ear.  “When was the last time someone _really_ fucked you. ”

An abrupt reminder that I am completely untested, and unskilled in this area.

“ _Uh_ ,” I clear my throat, look at the ceiling.  White, popcorned with sprayed on texture.  Shake black hair from my eyes.  “Never.”

He pulls back, angles his head to look at me, “Do you mean you’ve never bottomed, or..”

“Nothing.” Is that a clear enough explanation?  I can’t tell, my thoughts seem to be shaking me from the inside out.  He sighs, sounds frustrated.  (I’m sorry.)

“Well, want to give it go?” He grinds against me, I gasp.  I don’t say yes or no.  Some unfed part of me begging for attention, telling me to behave.  Don’t disappoint.  

“Here,” he still sounds exasperated, digs around in his pocket, removes a clear, plastic bag.  I recognize the contents easily.  “Try this.”  He holds the little bag in front of me, I stare at the white substance inside.

“You’re suggesting I insufflate benzoylmethylecgonine to stimulate the sexual experience?”  

He rolls his eyes, laughs, “You don’t have to call everything by its proper name.  Cocaine, yes, I’m suggesting we have a couple lines.”

I unclench a hand from the bookcase, take the contained powder into my hand in examination.  “Triple reuptake inhibitor,”( Not a good idea, possibly), “-triggers the mesolimbic reward pathway,” (also potentially causes a breakdown in the blood-brain barrier).

“Yes, I know how it works.  I’m a chemist too, after all.  Give me a card, I’ll cut the lines.”  He smiles.  Overlapping canine teeth.  Whiskey eyes. (My curiosity and rationale out of sync.)

“Fine.”  I dig into my pockets, take out the hard bit of plastic and hand it over.  I watch as Victor dispenses the substance onto the shelf behind me, spreads it out, methodically edging a few straight lines.  He bends his head, closes off a nostril with one finger, inhales through a short straw.  

“Easy.  You see?  Your turn.”

I mimic his technique, the powder burns my nasal pathways, faintly bitter against the back of my throat.  Unpleasant, not intolerable.  I shake my head slightly, as if that will help speed the distribution of the drug.

“You’re a natural.” Praise.  A strange thing to compliment.  “Stay right there, going to get a couple things.  You should be feeling that in a few minutes.  Good thing about our line of study, one always knows where to find a quality supply.”

He pushes away from me, not without licking a stripe up the side of my throat first, and disappears behind a door (I assume his bedroom.)

Minutes pass.  Is he waiting to deal with me until the high supposedly hits?  Right now I don’t feel much.  I could leave, slip out without a noise.

 

But.

Oh.  Wait.

 

Heart rate increases.  

My skin pricks with heat.  (Pyrogenic drug, stimulating muscle activity.)

Feel the need to move.  (Hyperactivity.)

Alert to everything.  Dripping faucet in the kitchen.  Victor in the next room, digging through a drawer.  When will he come out?

Feel like running, just for the hell of it.  I’d never stop.

I’m bored.  All alone with the rushing blood and beating heart, twitching hands.  

Door opening.  Victor.  Looks bright.  Everything matches on him, bronze hair, bronze eyes, bronze skin.  Blown pupils.  Increase in sexual desire.  Lowered inhibitions.  I feel I am in a similar state.

“All right?”

Hesitate, feel the need to move, “All right, Victor.”

He rushes toward me, pins me back up against the bloody bookcase.  (Is there really no softer surface in his flat?)  Shoves his thigh between my legs, I rut against it, instinct, need the friction.  Moves his mouth against mine, not really kissing, just breathing into me.  I dig my fingers into his back, rake nails against flesh.

“There, that’s better, huh?”

I don’t know.  Not really.  Maybe.  “Yes.”

“Would you stop staring at me like that? Close your eyes.”

“I’m only trying to--”

“It’s fucking weird.”

He digs a hand into my hair, yanks.  (Hurts.  I don’t say so.) Yanks again, he’s trying to turn me around and is using my hair as some sort of steering wheel for the rest of my body.  I follow the direction of the pull, mostly because it’s tearing at my scalp and I’d like for that bit to stop.  (Throat feels numb.)  

The hand slips down to the nape of my neck, forearm against the line of my spine, he pushes me over at the hips.  Holds my face down against cold wood shelving.  (Feels nice against my hot skin.)  My fingernails scrape and twitch against the shelf.  Need to move, I struggle against his grip, hear him undoing his belt.  The button of his jeans.  Tearing of condom packaging.

“Ah, fuck,” overlaying his erection with latex.  A flip of a cap and (I assume) a squeeze of some brand of lubricant onto his his had.

He’s still pinning me down, his other hand pressing against my perineum, slipping up to press against my entrance.  One finger tips in, retreats out after a moment, only to add a second finger far too soon.  I know I’ve cried out in reaction, struggle to evade.

“Stop fighting me.  This would be a lot easier if you’d hold still.”

“It’d be a lot easier to hold still if you weren’t hurting me.”

“Shut up.”

I’m hazily aware that this sounds wrong.  His tone edged in something a shade darker than mere rushed arousal.  (Something well hidden behind a handsome face and complimentary words.)  I try to keep stationary, grit my teeth.  (Why am I not saying no?)  Cocaine pushing itself through my blood, euphoria, fear and arousal to closely intertwined, compromising my ability to knowledgeably comply.  

 It isn’t a gentle stretch. (Not looking forward to the self-examination that will follow.)  Then something hotter, more blunt, lined against me.  He presses in slowly, I gasp for air.  (Paradoxical mix of pain and pleasure, mostly pain.)

“Shit, that’s good,” he pumps his hips languidly, “So tight.”

His thrusts pick up in intensity, driving me into the bookcase with every rut.  I narrowly avoid _Vogel’s Textbook of Quantitative Chemical Analysis_ falling to hit me in the head.  The head of his penis brushing my prostate, and that part doesn’t feel unpleasant.  (It’s just everything else I hate.  My traitorous skin craving affection, and this is the closest thing I can get.)  I feel pressure coiling at the base of my spine in spite of it all.  (Confusing.  Still.)  The inside of my chest, pounding, pounding.  

 

 _Thump Thump Thump_ , me, being fucked into a bookcase. _Thump Thump Thump,_ heart, looking for more blood to push. Everything setting each nerve ending alight.  

 

I writhe into Victor’s punishing rhythm, seeking climax, needing it (hating it) and needing it anyway.  The slap of flesh, the earthy smell of sex mixing with coffee and old cigarette smoke.  One hundred different sensations, the seductive slide of cocaine through my body, and suddenly I’m able to process every external thing at once.  Brilliant.  (Makes me wish for London and its constant rush of information.  Morning fog, cracked pavement, murder.)

“Oh god yeah,” Victor’s hand finds its way back into my (still sore) scalp, snatches into my hair, “ _Fuck_ , you’re sexy like this.”

I shudder.  My skin, burning and oversensitive.  I can’t use my hand to finish off the peaking tension, if I unlock my arms from where they’re holding me up against the shelves, I’ll fall.  Doesn’t matter in the end, a few well-placed thrusts on Victor’s end and my orgasm is wrenched out of me.  I clamp down with my teeth where thumb meets palm. The flesh threatens to give under the pressure. It feels less like bliss and more like something is being stolen, as if I’ve simply stood by and watched it being taken.  Gave consent.  (I did, though.  Part of me did.)

Even after the last ripples of climax are past, my heart still continues to beat itself wildly against my ribs.  I’m left shaking, the sweat-soaked, quickening slap of flesh behind me.

Victor’s suddenly surges forward, burying himself inside of me, “Yes,” and, “God, _ngh_ ,” he slumps over my back.  Rubs his cheek against my shoulder blade, soft kiss.  That feels.. nice.  The disparity is perplexing.  

 

I need to move.  My muscles twitch underneath Victor’s body.  

He pulls himself from me, out of me, my body is slightly numb.  It doesn’t hurt as much as it would have, otherwise.  I reach a trembling hand down to my own trousers, not bothering with any attempt to clean myself off, refasten the belt.  

What am I expected to do, now?  Make tea and continue with obligatory small talk?  Leave?  (That option seems appealing.)  I do have a thesis on the analysis of atmospheric organic aerosols that requires my attention.   There’s also the matter of the mould cultures I’ve been cultivating.  A less important essay in one of my required electives.  But the air just outside is crisp with winter and the slightest mist of rain, I could walk.  Run. Feel like I could do hundreds of things all at once, and do every bit of it without the slightest of errors.  (Brilliant!)

Ah, this would be hyperactive inclination stimulated by the drug.

I feel luminous.  Numbed on the inside, the enticing deluge of manic energy begging my higher attention.  

“Thanks, that was great,” Victor tells me.  I assume in reference to the intercourse.  Thanking me, as if I’d brewed him a superb cuppa.  I feel a faint twinge of some emotion before it whites out into nothingness, before I am forced to process it.  Psychological suppression, so much easier under this intoxicant.  “You can kip down on the sofa if you like.”

“No, that’s… No,” can’t fathom having a lie down, “I have a number of projects requiring my attention, currently.”

A knowing smile, curt nod, “You’ll be coming down from that soon enough, might as well get the most out of it while you’re able.”

Hadn’t considered that.  Would prefer otherwise.  

Victor steps toward me again, I take an automatic step backward, his eyes narrow and he reaches a hand out to press at my hair.

“You look like you’ve just been fucked.”  Yes, I know the look.  I comment on the obviousness of it constantly, to the eternal chagrin of those who I share accommodations with. (Should have gotten my own flat.  Would have required speaking with Mycroft or Mummy.  Haven’t done so since father’s funeral.  Nearly three years.  Mycroft still utilising my professors to spy on me.  Control, misplaced sense of obligation.)

“This doesn’t have to be a one-off, you know.  There’s more where that came from.”

That?  Meaning the sex, or the cocaine?  Both, implied.  “I’m amenable,” partially, at least.  I turn to the door, “Good evening.  I suppose I’ll see you next Thursday during lab.”

He picks up a pen from the bar, grasps my wrist and scribbles his mobile number onto the top of my hand.  My skin wrinkles up where he depresses the tip of the bic too firmly.

“If I don’t see you before then,” he seems confident in the speculation, “G’night Sherlock.”

Close the door behind me, scrub my hands through my hair.  Cold air against fevered skin, it feels magnificent.  Makes me want to take off my clothes and allow myself to be bathed in the damp and the frigidness.

The moon hanging low, a grey crescent, like the tip of a thumb nail.   Black sky striated with unknowable stars, baring itself down on me as if to wrap me in its infiniteness.  The thrumming of my frantic heart.

 

\-------

The high peaks far too quickly, approximately twenty minutes after leaving Victor’s flat.  I barely manage the entire walk back to the campus housing.  Worse than any caffeine crash.  I lie in bed, unable to keep myself from fidgeting.  Exhausted body, but my furiously shifting mind evades sleep.  I’m sore, everywhere.  (Although that is likely more to do with Victor’s proclivity for rough sex.)  I am aware that eating something might speed up the metabolism of the cocaine through my system, but I can’t abide the thought of getting up to move, much less the tedious act of eating, itself.  Additionally: Vague nausea.

Without the drug stimulating a sense of euphoria, I am left alone with my thoughts.  With the weariness, arrives the sense of shame.  I shove it down, reach for my trained sense of apathy.  

I smell like Victor’s flat.  Burned pizza and textbooks.  Sex. Saliva.  

I want to take a shower, wash the scent from my skin.  I also want to chase the high back to its giver.  I look at my hand where his number is written, black ink against white skin.  I’m too tired to do anything but lie here with my ambivalence and twitch.

 

\--------

 

I find myself back inside Victor’s flat two days later.

I inhale the gathered lines of white dust from off the coffee table while he edits dissertations.  The high hasn’t set in past the numbing feeling in the back of my throat, when I feel a tepid dripping over my lips.  I touch a finger to my nose, it comes away with blood.

“Oh.”

I turn my head to look for a towel of some sort.  I meet eyes with Victor, his pupils edging out the amber iris encircling them.  He gaze is transfixed on the drip of blood. Arousal as a result.  He pushes the paper bindings out of his way and walks over to where I’m sitting, he begins undoing the buttons on his trousers, the rasp of the zip.  I sit motionless, willing the high into existence.  He takes out his cock, half hard.  I expected this.  The sex. It’s fine. It’s fine.  (If he would just let me take my time about it.  How else am I expected to learn?)

Victor swipes the flat of his palm against the trail of crimson, smears it upward against my cheekbone, underneath my left eye.  It cools, it’ll be crusted over soon enough.

He nudges himself against my lips.  I open my mouth, wrap my lips around the glans, suck.  Soft heat.  Swirl my tongue.  “Yes, _fuck_.”  Not terrible, then.

“You’re staring at me again.  Stop.”

I shut my eyes.  

A hand positioned in my hair, tightening down to the follicles, he thrusts into my mouth.  It’s unanticipated, abrupt, and rough, I gag.  Alarmed.  Try to pull back, but I’m being held fast.  Another hard thrust, another sputtering gag.   (Not terrible: Amend: Terrible.)  Blood high on my cheeks.  The blood from my nose, from around my lips, metallic mixing with bitter.

A grunt from above me.  (Keep my eyes closed.) He keeps pressing forward, forward, in and out, in and out.  I can’t cough, can’t move through shock, quickening pulse, unsure if related to oxygen deprivation, or cocaine intoxication.  Unable to think.  

His thrusts go erratic, (sign of imminent orgasm), three forceful pumps, “ _Ah_ ,” his hand hard against the back of my neck, keeping me immobile, he pushes in as far as he can.  Ejaculates.  No other choice but to swallow.  Can’t feel (or taste) much past the dull anesthetic effect of the insufflated drugs.  He shoves me back against the back of the couch.  Cough. Gasp for air.  Wipe the saliva and escaped drops of semen from my mouth and onto my sleeve.  Silence, except for my breathing.  

(Skin beginning to surge with heat.  Pulse strong and pleasant, now.  Adrenaline.)

“Looks good on you,” he uses a thumbnail to scrape at the crusted blood on my cheek.  Leans over, strokes my bottom lip.  Kisses me softly.  He goes to get a paper napkin, holds it under the tap.  He walks back over and hands me the damp thing, I wipe absently, then stand and search for the bin.

“Better try intravenous injection next go.  Can’t have you walking about campus with a bloody nose.”  Victor says, giving a wistful look at the bin where a napkin is brown with it.  

 

I agree.

 

\-------

 

At the end of term, Victor receives a job offer from the biotechnology company _Gilead Sciences_.  He’ll work in America, accepting the position includes a scholarship to continue working toward a Ph.D.

“I’m going to miss shagging you, I think.”  He admits after we’re high and he’s fucked me over the desk in my dormitory.  No one else is here.  (We’ve continued this dynamic for the past two months, and have yet to actually copulate on any surface that would be conducive to such an act.  There was a bed _right there_.)  Every time it’s hard, and fast, and I’m left completely bereft. True, I typically figure out a way to achieve orgasm, but my skin still yearns for something else.  It craves the soft caresses and gentle kisses that Victor allows after he’s climaxed, always stopping before any semblance of satiation is reached.  He kissed me once, and took his time with it.  When he went to pull away I tried to hold him to me.

“Don’t stop,” it came out as a question against his lips.  And he laughed.  Pulled back and gave me a cloying look.

“Come now, you’re not exactly the cuddling type,”  (Am I not?) “I believe a wet cat would be more suited for it.” A statement of fact.  As if it’s something I ought to know.  He says it in such a way that I question my own wanting.

“No.  I suppose not.”

I never asked again.

 

Now he’s adjusting his jeans, smoothing his hair down, drinking a bottled water while I button my shirt.

 “I’m sure you’ll be able to persuade someone into your bed in America.”  I reassure.

“I’m sure I will.  Not one as clever as you,” I look over at him, smile tentatively, “Probably a better shag, undoubtedly nicer, but perhaps not as gorgeous.”  Victor’s compliments covering his insults.  He means them both.  “But, you know me.  I like the fucked up ones.”

 

And there it is, he defines me.  Brilliant.  Beautiful.  Broken.

Damaged goods.  Suited for one sort of love, or none at all.

“Be sure you bag that before you toss it in the bin,” he reminds me, gesturing toward the capped syringe sitting on the windowsill.  “I’m sure you’ll keep McDouglas in business, told him look out for the tall, dark, and handsome type, with weird eyes.”  He kisses me, a soft lick of his tongue against mine.  “Try not to be a complete prat to him.”  I tip my chin slightly, angling for a deeper kiss, and he gives in for a moment. He brushes fingertips against my hips, I nip at his bottom lip and he pulls away.  I think I’ll only miss these parts.  The warm allowances.  Simply having something other than utter solitariness.  Speaking out, and having someone reply in turn.  (Would never admit it.  Won’t give voice to the hollow carved from my loneliness.)

“Try to stay out of trouble,”  He opens the door to let himself out.

“Dull.”  

He grins, leaves.  Cold air gusts in with the shut of the door, it lingers.

 

\-----

**_Twenty-two_**

 

I do not attend class most days.  I complete assignments based on an escalating scale of the interest I bestow upon the subject.  My standing in first class honours falters, but it’s of no consequence to me.  My undergraduate studies will be complete by end of winter quarter.  I see no point in wasting my time with irrelevant information that will ultimately have no effect on any facet of career that I so choose.  I’ve already made arrangements to relocate in London.  My trust allotment pays enough for a cramped flat in Tottenham.  (High crime rate.  Could be interesting.)  

Mycroft’s minions have reported to him about my habitual use of cocaine, it seems.   Six months after Victor’s departure and McDouglas refused to sell to me anymore.  Mycroft paid him off, only after blackmailing him with his obvious illegal activities.  He wasn’t even subtle about it, obviously wanted me to fully comprehend his position of power, his relentless effort to govern my life to suit his purposes.  Controlling, rather than caring.  Mycroft’s distorted version of brotherly nurturing.  (He still won’t speak to me.)  I’m more discreet now as to whom I make dealings with.

Besides, my drug use is hardly an issue.  A precise 7% solution stimulates my mental faculties, brings everything into sharper focus.  Dulls the edge of boredom.

The problem lies in coming down from the high.  As long as my veins are lit with manufactured euphoria, I don’t have to confront the incomprehensible thing at the pit of me.  I can’t bring myself to classify the complex nature of my emotionality, it defies my incorporation and definition.  The constant battle of feeling.   I often feel fine, up until the point that I no longer fine.  I meet that point oblivious to how I found myself there in the first place, bashing my body against it like a brick wall.  Over and over again, everything inside, a nuclear bomb, toxic, inescapable.  

So I bury it.  Bury it in cocaine or morphine, experiments, deductions, solutions.  But the need is still there, burrows downward.   _Need_ , the ugliest part of anyone, it disgusts me.  It makes me disgusting.  Ambiguous and consuming in its nature.  The need to be known, the need to be seen, the need for air, distraction, the need for control, the need to be claimed, to be wanted and to want in return; it is amaranthine in its hunger.  I can’t figure out how to cut it out.  Victor seemed to fuck it out, his hands and cock and teeth pulling from me, like a tic.  He took from me.  Yet, I still find myself missing him, missing the moments that I wasn’t quite so alone.  (Mostly alone.  But not quite.  Right?)  

I find the high.  It blocks out unnecessary noise, numbs-- everything else.   A prick in my vein, concealed by the lay of a sleeve.  And I am alone.  It’s better that way, no distractions.  No inadequacies.  

 

I could do it. (Overdose.)  I wouldn’t.  But I _could_.  I’ve thought about it.  A bit of a rush, this game I play between life and death.  Not actively pursuing it, but contemplating the concept of my own oblivion at the end of a needle.  Mummy tried, once.  Took too many Clonazepam, nanny found her in bed lying in vomit.  Mycroft and I saw her in the hospital after her stomach had been pumped free of the drugs poisoning her body.  I was four.  One of my first memories is of mummy lying in the rumpled hospital bed, her gums stained with charcoal.  

“Mummy is not well, Sherlock.”  Mycroft told me when I asked why she had made herself so sick.  

The next day I brought her lilacs and buttercups I picked from the garden, she loved her flowers.  She tended endlessly to the gardens.  I wanted to make her happy again.  Mycroft set the bouquet in a cup of water at her bedside.  But she only lie there, curled in on herself, her face expressionless.  I would have thought her dead if it weren’t for the stream of tears that flowed forth, unbidden.  

“She’s sad.”  

“Yes.”  Mycroft grabbed my hand to tug me from the room.

“Because she wanted to die, and didn’t?”

“Perhaps.”  

 

I never asked Mummy about her motivations.  I was content with the times that she came in and out of my life in bouts of elation and normalcy.  (Strawberry crepes and french pressed coffee.)  I didn’t want to ask her for anything beyond what she was able to give.  

  
Whatever death may be, I am sure it will be a good mother


	4. The Willow Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wonder what that would be like. I feel envious of a son, the years he spent in the warmth of a mother. 
> 
> He was strangled and left to rot in the marshes.
> 
> Doesn’t matter. Covetousness in such matters do not follow logic. 
> 
> I’ll take what I can get. I straddle the fine line between sociopathy and pitiful humanity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Warning for animal death** So sorry. Forgive me. 
> 
> Difficult chapter to write, just ready to move on to the core of the story with John and Sherlock! Hopefully the story didn't suffer under my impatience! Also, I realize in canon that Sherlock is supposed to be around 34 when he meet John. It's 32 here. Just is. Damn you, canon.

_Twenty-five_

 

“So, will you be filing for the divorce, or will she?”

Why must police stations always have these fluorescent light fixtures?  They make my eyes twitch in their sockets. Hateful.

“This is the third time I’ve picked you up in the past two months.  And that’s not including the occasions where someone else has taken you in, or the times you’ve managed to outrun one of us.  We’ve been at this a couple years, don’t you think it’s time--”

“Ah, neither.  You’re hurt by her infidelity, but are remaining in the marriage for the sake of the children.  Predictable.”  I raise my cuffed hands to cup the back of my head and lean back in the aluminium chair.  “That isn’t noble, I hope you know.  Children aren’t nearly as unperceptive as you may think.”

“For god’s sake, Sherlock!  You’ve got to stop crashing crime scenes.  It’s--”

I roll my eyes.  ”It’s not as if your lot was making astounding progress.  The most cretinous among you should have seen that the stepmother is the murderer.  Suicide indeed.  You could see the gunshot residue on the inside of her thumb!  Hardly a difficult deduction.”

The beleaguered Sergeant Lestrade pushes a hand through greying hair.  Oh dear lord, he doesn’t understand.

“Really, Lestrade.  I would have thought it obvious even without GSR stain.  The woman was clearly motivated by her desire to keep the affair with her stepson secret.”

“How could you possibly know--?”

I huff, is it so terribly difficult for people to see?  Is it not what Scotland Yard is paid to do?  “About their little liaison?  Her lipstick under his collar, the bottle of perfume in his lavatory matching the scent she wore, there’s also the very telling stash of french lingerie in her measurements, hidden in his closet.  I hardly expect you to be able to read the reality of the affair in their glaringly obvious body language in respect to one another.   I realize all that can be considered circumstantial, but I highly suspect you’ll be able to obtain a warrant for their phone and email records where they’ve coordinated the crime.  Yes, the stepson was obviously complicit in the murder as well, likely was the one to suggest they make it appear as a suicide.  His sister discovered the nature of their relationship and planned to tell her terminally ill father.  As a consequence we can assume the son and wife alike would have been removed from their inheritances as stipulated by the husband’s will.  The girl confronted her brother, and when he was unable to persuade her into silence, the stepmother shot her dead.”

Sex and money, sex or money.  It’s nearly always one or both.  Why are humans so trivial?

The Sergeant stares at me as if I’ve managed to sprout a rare species of cacti from my shoulder. He focuses into his steaming cup of coffee, as if the clues are floating like oil to the top. Grimaces.  Sighs.  Pushes it toward me with two fingers.  “Alright, I’ll bring it up to my D.I.”

I smirk, try to interrupt, but, “ _After_ I get you sorted and on your way.  Drink that.  You look like shit.  How long has been since you’ve eaten?”

I don’t answer, but I sip at the coffee.  It’s terrible, no sugar, stale.  Burns my tongue, but warms the rest of me.  (No heating at the flat.  Might as well take to the streets.  Was lucky enough to stumble upon a crime scene.)

“Right, okay.  I’ve some leftover takeaway.  I’ll heat it up and bring it out while you wait for your brother.”

I choke on a burning mouthful of coffee, “My _Brother_?!”

Lestrade raises a brow, the corner of a lip curving upward, “Yeah, your brother.  I might not be a bloody savant, but I know where to look for a next of kin.  Figured I was on the right track when I found a Mycroft Holmes.  Hardly a difficult deduction,” He schools his thick accent into something more smooth, an imitation of me.  

“I never gave you permission to contact him!  Doesn’t that violate..  something?  Some protocol or..”

“And you sneaking into crime scenes doesn’t violate protocol?  Breaking the rules is fine, as long as it suits you?”

I sit back into my chair, bare my teeth, look for a way out.  (Will have to pick the cuffs.)

“Look, Sherlock.  You’re clearly an intelligent man.  A right genius.  All of your… observations, have been spot on.  But you think you’re invincible!  If I weren’t busy arresting you at crime scenes, I’d be arresting you at drug busts.  Don’t think I can’t tell.  You don’t work your way through the ranks without knowing an addict when you see one.”

“It’s a serotonin-norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitor.” I spit out.

“Fancy name for coke.” He levels at me, then shrugs, “Or at least I assume, because cocaine is what I found in your trouser pocket.”  He holds up the bag he’s clearly filched.  Grabbed it without me noticing.  (Unwilling flicker of respect.  Still an idiot, though.)

“So, what are you planning to do?  Turn me over to narcotics?”  Better a cell than being handed over to Mycroft.  Lestrade hangs his head, then glances quickly between the blinds of the room I’m being held in.  He tosses my bag back to me, I catch it, both cuffed hands coming up to pluck it from the air.  

“I’m not going to do that, God knows I should.  But I’m not.  Not this time.  I have this inkling that negative reinforcement would be wasted on you, in this case.”  He shifts his weight, and makes eye contact with me.  “Get clean.  I’m not making any promises, but if you get clean I will try to figure out a way to.. work, with you.  Legally.  I’ll talk to the Detective Inspector, something.  No more finding you sorting through murderers’ closets for lingerie without being invited.”

“I was looking for _evidence-_ -”

“Just think about it, yeah?  Suss out what it is you want more.  I can tell you that it’s a goddamn waste of potential if you keep up this way.”  His gesture encompasses my entire body.  I want to disagree, explain that I am stimulating potential, not squandering it; but I feel tired, and cold, and hungry.  I don’t remember the last time I slept, and my skin is buzzing for another fix.  

“Why do you care?”  It’s all I can manage.  I don’t understand.  I’ve already proven myself a reliable investigatory resource during a high, probably could earn him the promotion he’s been seeking.  Detoxification would be a tedious process, it would take time, I would hardly be able to concentrate past the craving.  (Tried once, as an experiment.  Was awful.  Could not even think.  Exhaustion.  Malaise.  The dreams.)

“Why do I ca--, Sherlock, you’re practically a child.  Don’t roll your eyes, I’m serious.  You’re too smart for your own good, you could be doing anything.  Instead you’re wandering around London like some stray, ruddy dog, getting into fights-- I’ve seen the bruises-- putting fuck knows what into your body.  If you were my son--”

“I’m not,” I snarl at him.  It’s none of his business.  

“If you were my son,” he continues unabated, “I would hope you’d have enough bloody sense to know a dead end when you see one.  Listen for once, I’m trying to help you not..”  He grunts and turns to look through the blinds, “Forget it.”

I stare into the wall, refusing to respond, refusing to look at anything other than the painted cinder blocks, the absurdly framed motivational posters depicting a soaring jet with “ _Dare to Aim Higher_ ,” printed in big block letters underneath.  

There’s a knock on the other side of the door, I already know who it is.  My heart skitters nervously. It shouldn’t.  Seven years of silence and avoidance says otherwise.  Lestrade takes another moment to appraise me, sighs, opens the door.

 

“Sergeant Gregory Lestrade, I presume.”  Mycroft’s voice, magniloquent and controlled.  

“Er..  Yeah.  Mr. Holmes,” Lestrade nods toward me, shuffles around in his pockets for the cuff keys, “He’s able to leave immediately, I didn’t technically book him this time.”

“How expedient, thank you Sergeant.”

Lestrade walks over to my chair, I hold my wrists out while he keys the lock and removes the the metal from where it’s clasped around me.  I refuse to pet at and soothe the skin that I’ve abraded from struggling against the restraints.

“Think about what I said,” He tells me, ‘And for god’s sake, get clean.  Fat lot of good you’ll do us in prison on drug charges.”  He smiles, friendly, somehow.  Not mocking.  I feel inclined to smile back.  (I don’t.  Mycroft is still standing right there.)

“Sir, make sure he eats something,” he says, just to Mycroft, “Evening, Mr Holmes, Sherlock.”  And he’s gone.  I’m left with Mycroft and his grey, three piece suit that he still seems to favor after seven years, and the umbrella.  The _sodding_ umbrella.  

We stare at each other silently.  Competing, even now.  Who will be the first to look away, who will be the first to speak.  A woman is laughing somewhere outside the door, the ping of a microwave finishing its cycle.

 

“You require a bath.  You smell ghastly.”

“You require a diet.  You’ve gained weight.”

He raises an eyebrow, “Hello, brother dear.”

I push myself out of my seat and stalk toward the door, “Feel free to continue being physically absent from my life.  I’m doing quite well on my own.  Good evening, Mycroft.”  I reach for the metallic knob, he blocks the effort with the hook of the umbrella.

He scoffs, “Hardly an accurate assessment of your current state.  I can see from the dilation of your pupils you’re beginning to come down from a high.  You’ll require nutrition of some sort to metabolize before true detoxification begins.”  He removes his mobile from his pocket, tapping away at the keys before glancing at me again, “Do you still prefer mushrooms on your pizza?”  He send a text.  Doesn’t wait for my response.  Rhetorical question.

“Not exactly a nutritious meal.”

“Ah, so you are planning on going through the detoxification process.  That’s excellent, I have some work I need you to do when you’re finished with that ordeal.”

My mind is already sluggish from fatigue, the caffeine from the coffee does nothing to combat the wave of exhaustion that overcomes my body.  (I push my body, my body pushes back.  Transport, always betraying me at the most inconvenient times.)  All I can manage is, “Work?”

 

“Yes, I expect so.  I’ve been keeping track of your little hobby, here.  I have a case of my own that could use your methods of expertise, requires a bit of legwork.  Nasty bit of business regarding murders, possibly treason. Perhaps when you’re able.  For Queen and Country, you see.”

Pause.  Consider.  (Curiosity.  Damn.) “What sort of murders?”

“The sort we can discuss later.”

Manipulative bastard.  “I’ll need to return to my flat.”

“I’ve already arranged for your things, well technically just your violin and labware, to be brought to my house in Hampstead,” he begins, I try to interrupt, “Please, Sherlock, as if I would want to endure witness to your dramatic substance withdrawal.  I’ll be at my property in South Kensington.  I’ve already sent one of my assistants to procure a wardrobe for you.  I’ve taken the liberty of having a nurse put on call in case--”

“I don’t need your misplaced sense of charity, Mycroft,” I shout at him, “I don’t need clothes, or nurses or--!”

“It’s winter.  Your clothes are threadbare.  Not to mention unwashed.”

 

Ah, yes.  I see what’s happening here.  Quite obvious.

 

“I won’t apologize.”  Silence falls, the dead weight of it like a hammer coming down between us, “And I won’t forgive you, either.”  My fingers shake.  My throat constricts.  I won’t weep, but I feel it there, the scratch in the back of my throat.  I feel the heft of seven years, alone, on the most fundamental level.  I told him.  So many years ago.  I knew then that father would come for me, come after me.  I asked him for help, and he asked me for silence.  

And now here I am, an addict in a police station.  The psychology of the situation is fairly simple, especially for a man like Mycroft who makes it his business to manipulate people around their weaknesses.

“I don’t expect you to,” he looks down, nearly  ashamed, “--on either account.”  

I swallow, stick my hand into my pocket where a bag of cocaine brushes against my fingertips.  It would be easy to slip Mycroft’s custody.  I could return back to my flat (without my Stradivarius, and labware: Unacceptable) mix a 7% solution, bury myself under the high.

“Do something with that,” I toss the bag, he catches it against his chest, “I’d rather have chinese.  I’ve been wanting to do a study regarding the degradation of asiatic food during the digestion process.  If I do end up vomiting, chinese will be more relevant.”

Mycroft somehow manages to grimace and smile at the same time, I ignore it.  

“That can be arranged.”

 

We leave the tiny holding room, I see Lestrade speaking to the DI in another office.  He looks out to me, nods encouragingly.  Roll my eyes.  (Hope someone will inform me of the outcome of the arrest of the murderous evil stepmother, and traitorous brother.)

 

I follow Mycroft out to the black car, the last memory I have of him, is his hand shoving me down into the back seat to send me away from father’s funeral.  Angry and ashamed of my painful outpouring of emotion.  I rub absently at the gooseflesh the wind has coaxed upward on my arms.

 

\------------------------------

 

I vomit chinese takeaway on Mycroft’s  VIG Chesterfield leather sofa.  I pick through the mess with my chopsticks.  Nothing of any interest, scientifically speaking.  But Mycroft’s face goes red, and he rages over the 4,300 quid monstrosity.  He hands me a bucket to tote about, “--Just in case you feel like ruining the tapestries while you’re at it.”

 

I actually made him react.  I feel as if I’ve accomplished some glorious thing.

(I do clean the vomit, though.  Terrible smell, that.)

Besides.  The sofa is comfortable and I want to sleep on it.

 

\---------------------------------

 

The nausea passes.  The burgeoning craving seeds itself throughout my body.  I lay on the couch and tremble.  I drift.  I dream.

 

\------------------------

Dreams turn from unintelligible ramblings of an addict’s mind, to memories.  (Which is so much worse.)

 

I found an old, orange, tabby cat in the garden shed.  I was nine.  He had been trapped since the previous day.  I had watched him nudge past the Groundskeeper that morning as I sat underneath the weeping willow, reading Moby Dick.  I assumed he’d wander out before evening.  Sweat stung my eyes.

 

The following morning he was mewling and scratching at the door.  He sounded trapped, and hungry.  I brought him cream and a scotch egg nanny had made.  I opened the door, sure he would bolt for freedom, but instead he twined himself around my legs, weaving in and out between my ankles.  I reached down to pet him, there was a deer tick behind his ear.  I set the food along the wall and fetched tweezers and petroleum jelly from the bathroom.  The creature lapped at the cream until it clung to his whiskers.  He didn’t move as I smeared the thick jelly around the insertion of the parasite’s head.  I eased the blood drunk thing out with the tweezers and burned it in a tin cup.  

The cat ignored the scotch egg until I began pinching bits off and handing it to him in the palm of my hand.  His teeth and sandpaper tongue scraped against my skin, tickled.  I didn’t give the thing a proper name.  “Cat” did just fine.  He answered to it.

I sat with my back against the ragged wood, grey chips of paint fragmenting off onto my shirt.  Cat insinuated himself onto my lap as if he’d always belonged there, nipping at my fingers until I began stroking his tangerine coloured fur.  His contentment vibrated from his chest, onto the tops of my thighs.  He’d nibble at my thumb when I would try to stop my ministrations and hiss and scratch if my fingertips ventured into less satisfying areas.  (Belly, paws, haunches:  Off limits.)  A bit ornery, bit demanding.  I admired his attitude.

I  went with Mycroft into the village and bought cans of tuna.  I would feed him in the mornings at our usual spot alongside the garden shed.  The fish stunk.  He loved it.  

We persisted in our routine for three weeks and two days.  Cream and tuna in the morning, followed by a complacent doze on my lap.  I began reading my books against the shed instead of the willow.  

 

Father came home early from the EcoSoc conference in Vienna, he came during the night while I was sleeping.  When morning poured itself through the white linen curtains of my room, I went about my usual routine.  Wash.  Dress.  I didn’t eat breakfast that morning, only gathered the can of tuna into my pocket, the saucer of cream in hand.  

Father was on the porch.  He had his gun propped against his shoulder, taking aim at the chipping paint of the shed.  It was the gun he used for shooting wild hares when his business partners or other council members would attend the manor for various social occasions.  They would hunt in the mornings.  They’d typically come back empty handed and would begin drinking.  I’d lock myself in the room, and hide under the bed on those nights; listening to rattle of my door knob.  

I froze when I connected the sight of the gun to its intended game.  Cat.  Waiting for me in his usual spot by the cracked door of the shed.

“Father,” I began, keeping my voice indifferent, “That’s the garden cat.  It chases the rodents from the nursery.”  I pointed toward the greenhouse in the distance, its glass panels reflecting in the sun.  

I wanted to say, “Please don’t hurt him.  He’s mine.  He eats cream and tuna, and bites my fingers when I don’t scratch him properly.”  

But I couldn’t.  That sort of sentiment would only solidify his resolve.  We weren’t permitted to love anything out loud.

In the end it didn’t matter.

“Really?  Because I most assuredly found mouse droppings by the orchids.”

Father turned and regarded me, his eye resting momentarily at the bulge of the canned tuna in my pocket, the bowl of white cream clutched in my childish hand.  (In my panic, I forgot to set it aside.)  He faced outward again.

“He seems rather tame, to me.”

He shot.  I bit my tongue and flinched.  I watched Cat crumple and fall.  I stood motionless behind father as he lowered the gun.  Wind caught in my hair.  A crow cried out overhead.  I stared at the dead cat on the lawn.  

“Bury that, before it begins to foul the yard with its stench.”

He took the dish of cream from my hand and disappeared behind the door.

I walked out to the orange body.  A neat shot, close to his heart, enough to kill him instantly.  At least there was that.  Blood stained the lawn, beading up against waxy blades of grass, soaking downward to feed the earth.  

I didn’t take him out to the willow and bury him as I had done the baby bird.  I didn’t want to abide the temptation to dig him back up that I would inevitably succumb to.  Not to examine his bones as I had the Jay’s.  I didn’t want my empty hands to itch with the desire to hold.  Logic at war with sentiment.  I did not even realize I had let myself fall into its trap.  

I wrapped Cat in an old nursery blanket and burned him out past the hedgerow where no one would come looking.

I stared at my ceiling that night.  He was waiting by the shed for me.  And he was killed because I had claimed him.  A can of tuna and a saucer of cream.  He probably died hungry.

I didn’t cry.  I just lie there, hating.  Missing.  

 

I dream about it.  Even in the dream, I don’t save him.  

 

\---------------------------------

_**Thirty-one** _

 

“More tea, Sherlock?”  she doesn’t wait for my answer, she pours the fragrant chamomile into my cup, spoons in a tawny glob of honey.  The delicate bone china is painted with pink blossoms and green ivy, an heirloom set.  She watches me drink, her slightly arthritic fingers rubbing absently at the handle of her own cup.

“You need to eat, dearie, you must be starved.  I haven’t seen you touch a thing since this dreadful ordeal began!  You rest there, I’ll make us a brown stew.”

She rises from her chair, favouring a damaged hip. Chronic pain wrought from an old injury that never healed properly.  More precisely, the required treatment was never rendered as the injury was a result of domestic violence.  By the time she was able to extract herself from the relationship, it was years too late for the hip to be anything other than a painful reminder of the price paid for freedom.  I rise to assist, she tuts and pats my shoulder, leveling a stern look in my direction, the face of a scolding mother.

“Really, Mrs. Hudson, that isn’t nec--”

“Hush now, you’ll eat what I set in front of you.  It’s the least I can do.”  

I allow her to press at me, I insinuate myself back into the ridiculous papasan chair, hear the creak of the wicker strain under my weight.  (Chair like a bowl.  I can’t imagine its design is conducive to posture.)  It’s meant for curling up in.  It’s also not the chair of an older woman with acquired unilateral hip dysplasia.  Her son’s, then.  She kept it after his death.  Sentiment.  

Mrs. Hudson’s chopping can be heard from the kitchen, the smell of onion and browned beef mingle with the lingering scent of vanilla candles and chamomile tea.  She runs the tap, a stock pot scrapes against the range.

I rise again, walk a pattern through the parlor, and find myself examining the scant family pictures arranged on the mantel.  A picture of a younger version of the woman in the kitchen, hair not yet greying, only the hint creases around her brow and mouth.  She stands in a Christmas jumper beside a tall, young man in a long, charcoal coloured coat. His arm is threaded around her waist, posing for the camera.  

“Smart boy, such a shame” I had not realized she had come to stand behind me.  She rubs her hands against the front of her dress, drying them.  “He was always the inquiring sort, like you.”  She sniffs.  It’s been well over two years since the boy was killed, she still mourns him, quietly.  

“You realize your husband will likely be sentenced to death.  If it is of any consolation.”  I grasp a frail shoulder in my hand, an attempt at comfort.  I don’t know why I do it.  I like her.  She’s quite the survivor, having lived through substantial domestic abuse at the hands of a serial rapist and murderer, the filicide of her only son.  

The case was was hardly a difficult one.  I found where the idiot kept prizes from each of his victims underneath the floorboards in the master bedroom. (An antique locket, a red, silk, hair ribbon, a tube of coral coloured lip rouge.)  It was obvious the son had grown suspicious, and at some point followed his father to the abandoned Quonset hut where he conducted his assaults.  When Daniel Hudson made it clear that police involvement was imminent, the man panicked and strangled his own son to death.  Afterward he had inflicted post-mortem wounds and rid the body of its watch and wallet in hopes of the murder being interpreted as a simple mugging gone horrifically wrong.  He dumped the body in the dank Floridian marshes, leaving the flesh at the mercy of the Spectacled Caimans inhabiting the swamp.

He played the part of the grieving father, then fled the family home without a trace.  It is at that point that I was put into contact with Mrs. Hudson via her sister in Loughton.  (Seems my blog brings in the readership of middle aged woman, psychotics, and choice individuals at Scotland Yard.)  I took the case and flew to Moore Haven, Florida.  Solving the case took less than a day, tracking down the whereabout of one Mr. Albert M. Hudson was another matter.  After 72 hours of trudging through the glades for clues, being nearly consumed alive by mosquitoes, and having a particularly alarming stand off with a large alligator intent on lying prostrate in the middle of the road that led to the river shack Mr. Hudson was inhabiting; the case concluded.   Mr. Hudson was taken into custody and confronted with the evidence of his crimes.  I found I rather hated him, there at the end.  I was satisfied on a rather personal level that the death penalty would be pursued during his sentencing.  

Mrs. Hudson pats my hand where it wraps around her shoulder.  “You remind me of him, a bit.  My Daniel.”  She picks up the picture, runs her fingers over the glass.  She caresses the face of her dead child with a painted fingernail.  “I got him that coat as a Christmas gift before, well..  You know.  Course it’s far too thick to be worn about in this climate,” she nods her head toward the sliding glass doors.  The late afternoon heat presents itself as a shimmer, distorting the spiky cattail plants in the distance.  “Hold on a second, just need to--”  she hurries off before finishing the thought.  She stirs the pot in the kitchen, then I hear the open and close of door somewhere down the hallway where the bedrooms are  located.  She emerges into the parlor again, the dark coat from the picture hanging over her arm, the hem dragging the floor.  

“There now, arms out, let’s see how this fits!”

I stare at her blankly, she levels another stern look, intent on waiting me out.  

“Fine.” I stick out my arms as if I’m being fit for a confirmation suit.  She smiles, slips the coat on over my arms, tugs at the collar, walks a circle around me with a contemplative finger to her chin.  The coat is, in fact, a pretty magnificent piece.  Belstaff, Millford style, Irish wool tweed.  (It’d be brilliantly warm in the damp chill of London’s streets.)  

“It never hung properly on Daniel, perhaps his shoulders were a bit broader..  But it suits you so nicely, dear.”  She cups my cheek affectionately, I smile at her.  

“It’s a very fine coat.  Not favorable to this state’s environment, but fine nonetheless.”  I begin to shrug it off to hand it back over to her, but she shakes her head and begins backing away toward the kitchen again.

“You keep that, Sherlock.”

“Mrs. Hudson, I couldn’t possibly accept--” I start, willing myself not to be moved by the depth of sentiment behind her desire to give me, of all people, such a gift.  Surely there’s a nephew, or.. someone.  She’s only a client, after all.  I’ve not known her for more than a week.  Within the first five minutes of our introduction to one another she said, “ _You’re a bit of an odd one, aren’t you, dear.  Would you like some chocolate biscuits?_ ”  She began fussing over me.  Because I remind her of her dead son.  And I didn’t care, it was.. nice.  Different.  And I liked her.

“Take it back home with you, a nice coat like that needs to be worn by a handsome young man such as yourself,” and then, “It’s a gift, Sherlock.  I want you to have it.”

I look back down to the greatcoat, unable to stop my fingers from smoothing the pockets, circling the red stitching at the topmost button hole.  I clear my throat.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson.”

She smiles at me again, very pleased.

“Will you continue to live in Florida after your husband’s trial concludes?”  I look about the house, it’s too large.  Too many empty rooms.  There’s no son to visit her, to assist her with menial tasks when her hip injury persists in it ailings.  She would be alone.

She sighs, frets with her hands, possibly considering the same thing.

“I don’t suppose so.  Too many memories here.”

“Where will you go?”

“Back to London, I expect.  I bought something like a Maisonette on Baker street ages ago, after my father passed on.  Bought it with my inheritance, I always planned on moving back home.  But Mr. Hudson wouldn’t stand for it, you see.  Lovely little place though, a cafe right next door. Perhaps I could get nice couple to the rent the upstairs flat.  You don’t happen to know anyone--”

“I’m currently in the market for a flat.” I blurt out, over-enthusiastic.  After the worst of the cocaine detoxification passed, I continued on at my  less-than-ideal flat in Tottenham.  (Much to Mycroft’s disdain.)  I’ve stopped for coffee and breakfast after cases at a Speedy’s cafe on Baker street.  The coffee isn’t the best, and the fried tomato from the full English breakfast is notoriously soggy, (but when is the fried tomato _not_ soggy) but the location is at a nicely central point.  With Mrs. Hudson as my landlady there might be an endless supply of honey tea and chocolate biscuits being pushed my way.  Perhaps she’d continue to fuss over my muddy shoes.  

She looks at me, surprised, I think I’ve just said all of that out loud.  (Oh. God.)  I cough a bit, walk forward, pause, make an awkward gesture, cough again.

“I mean, once you’ve relocated back to London, I’d be amenable to viewing the property.”

She smiles again, takes my hand and pats it, “Well, that’s settled then.  Now how about that bowl of stew.”  

I nod, she beams.  She leaves to ladle the food into dishes.

Perhaps if mummy had not been so unwell, she might have been like Mrs. Hudson.  All chocolate biscuits, and telling me to wipe my feet off on the stoop before coming inside.  

I wonder what that would be like.  I feel envious of a son, the years he spent in the warmth of a mother.  

He was strangled and left to rot in the marshes.

Doesn’t matter.  Covetousness in such matters do not follow logic.  

I’ll take what I can get.  I straddle the fine line between sociopathy and pitiful humanity.

 

\------------

_**Thirty-two** _

 

There hasn’t been a case in weeks.

Bored.

I relapse.  (Again.)  Time and mentality somehow has changed the way the high feels.  

Seems less worth the risk.  I can’t lose The Work.  

 

Afterward, I put my sterilized injection kit away, hide it in a box of old uni textbooks.  It’ll be there if I need it again.

 

Mrs. Hudson sends an email through my blog.  Her husband’s case has processed through the courts:  Guilty.  Death penalty, as predicted.  She managed to sell her house in Moore Haven some time ago.  She’s settled into Baker Street and wants to know when I would like to have a look at the available flat.  I make plans to meet her in three days time. Perhaps she’ll make tea, I’m all out.

 

\-------------

LeStrade calls.  A case!  Fantastic!  Something about a ladder, a string of robberies, and a beaten and lacerated corpse.  (Will get the specifics later.)  He was promoted to DI months and months ago.  Pretty soon he’ll be asking my help regarding these serial suicides.  (Murders.  All of them.  Obvious.)  Just have to bide my time, wait until they’re desperate and confused.  

Out of their depth.

Will need to go to Bart’s later.  Need a cadaver to test a hypothesis out on.  Molly’s working.  Only need to tilt my head the proper way, and she’ll hand over anything I require.

\---------------

 

Mike Stamford walks in on me pinching pipettes from the storage closet.  

“Lo’ Sherlock, can I help you find something?”

“No, I think I’ve gotten all I need.  I see you’re headed out to lunch.  Your wife packed your meal, salad, but you’ll be buying the pork from the cafeteria.”

“As usual, you’re right.”

“My brother can’t abide diets either.”

He grabs a stitching kit from the shelf above me, smiles and shakes his head. “Have a case on today, I expect?”

“Yes.  Nothing too interesting.  I’m moving  into my flat this evening, I ought to be finished before then.”

“Leaving Tottenham?”  

I nod.   (A pigeon somehow flew into the vents and proceeded to die.  The whole flat smells of rotting bird.  I’d rather just move then crawl into the vents after it.)  Besides, I already have a dead pigeon in the freezer.  Hardly need another, for the time being. “I’ll be residing in central London, now.”

“Central London, you’re lucky you found a decent flat.  Diane and I looked last year, between both of our salaries it was still difficult finding something within our price range”

I rifle through boxes of labelled equipment.  I wonder if anyone would notice if the dialysis tubing went missing.  (I might need it.  For something.  Can’t be sure what just yet, perhaps something to do with my frozen pigeon.)  

“You have a flatmate, then?”

Honestly, Mike Stamford.  What do you think?  

“No.” Ah!  Litmus paper.  I’ve just run out. “Although I can see where a flatshare would be economically beneficial.”

“Oh.  Well, there are plenty of students round’ here in need of one.  I’ll ask around if you like.”

“While I appreciate the gesture, I think that would be a rather challenging pursuit for you.  I’ve been informed on multiple occasions that I am difficult to get on with in closed environments.”

Mike chuckles a bit, shrugs.  Takes my dialysis tubing from my hand (Damn!), “Well, I’ll still keep an eye out.  Good day, Sherlock.”

“Mmh.”  I wave a hand.

Molly texts me about the post-mortem bruises on, “I knew him, he was nice,”  left by the riding crop.  Everything as predicted.  

I take my pipettes and commandeer a bench.

 

\---------------------------

 

Mike Stamford walks into my lab.  I’m in the middle of an analysis, it’s annoying and--

 

“Bit different from my day.”  

 

Ah.  He’s brought someone.  Potential flatmate.  (Really?)  I look up.  A compact sort, standing at parade rest.  

Doctor.  (Practically said it when he walked in.) But, also, military.  Cane: Invalided.  (Shot:  Perfectly valid assumption.) The leg isn’t the source of the primary injury, though.  Shoulder?  Perhaps.

I ask to borrow Mike’s phone, he offers his instead.  (Fantastic.  Loads you can deduce from a man’s phone.  Like a brother’s apparent alcoholic tendencies.)

Tan lines around his wrists.  Thought his eyes were brown, they looked as much in the dark.   They’re blue.  Dark blue.  Cobalt.  (Not that the shade matters.  Was just noting.)    “Afghanistan, or Iraq?”

It’s Afghanistan.  Newly home, difficulty transitioning back into a civilian lifestyle.  Still sees himself as a soldier.  I can practically watch as he categorizes me:  Patient, or Combatant.  

Which am I?  Combatant.  Most likely.  

He’s mistrustful.  He evaluates me, that’s fine, I’m doing the same in turn.  

“This is my friend, John Watson.”  

Oh yes, a name.  John.  Common name.  Stoic man.  (Ash blonde hair.  Still bleached a bit from the desert sun.  Not that this matters, either.)

One can definitely reason out the deeply seated emotional turmoil bubbling just under the surface.  Post traumatic stress disorder, not an uncommon affliction of soldiers having been involved in violent combat.

That limp is obviously psychosomatic. I tell him as much.  Intermittent tremor: Left hand.

He doesn’t disagree.  I’ve baffled him, not offended, either he will or he won’t show up to view the flat.

(Mrs. Hudson would make him a cuppa.  He’d appreciate the gesture.  Wonder if he likes chocolate biscuits.)  

I believe he will.  He’ll meet me there tomorrow.  

I smile at him.  Wink.  Leave John Watson Military Doctor standing in the lab with lips puckered in a bout of analytic confusion.

 

The air in the hallway blasts cold against my skin.  I think about the set of John Watson’s brow.

 

\-------------------------

 

“Extraordinary.  Quite extraordinary.”

“ _Brilliant_.”

“That’s fantastic.”

 

Something small bursts open at the pit of me with every one of John’s uttered praises.  He doesn’t turn around within the same sentence to level his plaudits with smarting abuse as Victor had.  He gives his words freely to me, as if they cost him nothing at all.

But there’s The Work, and leave him at a crime scene with Lestrade and his paid idiots.  (Pink suitcase:  Easy to locate.  Child’s play.) I have the gaudy thing sitting in the corner of the flat, and, oh, John isn’t here.  I’d rather him be here. I text him.

**Could be dangerous -SH**

He’s sitting across from me, texting a murderer, within the hour.  

(How interesting.)

We (he) eats at Angelo’s.  He says he’s most certainly not my date, when Angelo assumes.  

We’re brought a candle anyway.  John keeps licking his bottom lip.  Unconscious habit.

 

“..You’re unattached, just like me.  Fine.  Good.”

Unattached.

Did he-

That was..  decidedly not a heterosexual response.  Right?  

(Panic.)

Default response: Married to my work.

 

He flounders awkwardly, apparently he didn’t intend for that to come across as a line.  

(Can’t decide on relief or disappointment at that.)

Relief.  Definitely relief.  I should be relieved.

 

\-------------------------

 

He doesn’t realize he’s left his cane at Angelo’s.  (The case of John Watson’s psychosomatic limp: Solved.)  

We’re panting up against the wall in Baker Street’s foyer, having just run several blocks in thin winter air.  He liked it, chasing a possible serial killer across London.  His lungs are burning, like mine, adrenaline high, alive and breathless with it.

He makes me laugh, he draws it out of me, easy. He smiles up at me with his unabusive mouth.  My pulse leaps into my throat, I wonder if he still smells like the lasagne he ate before we--

 

No.  That’s--

No.

But he’s taking the bedroom upstairs.  

He won’t stay.  Because no one stays.  But he will, for awhile.  It will be fantastic.

 

His jumper looks soft.

 

\---------------------------

 

John shoots a cabbie (serial killer) for me.  He shoots and kills a cabbie from the next unit over, through one open window, shattering another, and into the chest of a murderer.  Gorgeous shot.   

 

He was standing over by the police vehicles, as I paused in my enumeration to Lestrade regarding the qualities possessed by the Cabbie’s killer.  I glanced over and met a pair dark blue eyes, realized exactly who I was describing.

 

He doesn’t have a sense of guilt about using his (illegal) gun to shoot a man dead.

 Not that man, at least.

 John Watson and his straightforward sense of justice, despite it being at odds with the societal expectation of ethics.  Complex; in a way that differs vastly from my own nature on a fundamental level.  A balancing act of aggression and kindness, indifference and concern; drawn straight through his middle, one feeding into the other.  

He calls me an idiot, but he doesn’t mean it the way Donovan and Anderson mean “freak” or “psychopath.”  John says “idiot” and I want to lie down and roll around in the word. Wear it like a name badge on my shirt.   

I buy dinner, Chinese. Probably a poor way to reciprocate, dim sum is a pale thank for saving someone’s life. (Although, I’m fairly sure I had chosen the correct pill.  The non-lethal one.  Dying would have really been a dreadful way to end the evening.)  Tell him to kip on the sofa at Baker street for the night, it’s late, he’s tired, it’s closer than his bedsit.   

“That’s not how you use those.”  I nod toward John’s hands.  He shrugs, spears a dumpling as if the utensil is a kebab skewer instead of a chopstick.

“You sure? Because it looks like it’s working all the same.”  He bites the pork dumpling.  Licks soy sauce from his lip.  Pink tongue.  He lifts an index finger to get the waiter’s attention.  “I’m shattered,” he tells me, “Just need a box so we can take this home.”

 

Home.  Yes, John.  Let’s go home.

 

We split a cab, and I wonder what John sounds like while he’s sleeping.

\----------------------------------

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Likely I won't be able to update again for another week, a bit of family vacation I must contend with. Don't know if everyone would be down for me sitting in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World with my laptop in hand, writing slash porn. But it is coming. (I mean that in the onslaught of ejaculation way.)


	5. Lifeblood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Then why even tell me?” Slick twine through my skin, blood wells up only to be dabbed away with gauze, “If you knew I wouldn’t be accessing any new information, why bother?”
> 
> He pauses, sighs, cuts the twine, “Sometimes it’s nice just to have it said out loud, Sherlock.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I hope this is cohesive and readable. First person POV can be tricky, especially when it's Sherlock, especially when the rating bomb drops.

\-----

John prefers apricot jam on his muffins.  He doesn’t like the seeds in the blackberry, or the strawberry, or the raspberry.  I sneak an assortment of seedless jams into the cupboard.  Apricot is the first to be emptied, followed closely by plum.  Fig preserves (abhorrent) run a distant third place.

 

“Why are there fifteen different types of jam in the pantry, Sherlock?”

“It’s for an experiment.”

He pauses, his split wholemeal muffin slides across his plate when he shifts his wrist.  He warily regards the assortment of glass jars.  “Right.  Of course.  Are they safe to actually eat?”

“I expect so.”

That answer seems to work for him, he grabs the jar of Apricot.  Uses a blunt knife to spread a thick layer of sunny orange across the muffin.

He doesn’t touch the orange-lemon-ginger marmalade.  Doesn’t even seem to want to smell it, the lid is still sealed.

“I don’t need to taste it to know that I’ll hate it.  Spread it across _your_ toast, if you’re so keen.”

No, it sounds disgusting.

Bit of wild card anyway, that one.

 

The study takes two months before enough jams have been sampled to draw a knowledgeable conclusion.  

I suppose I could have just asked him.  

“ _Which is your favorite flavor of fruit spread, John?  For science, John_.”

I can’t sort out why that seemed like the more difficult option.

 

He licks absently at the corner of his mouth after taking a bite.

His lips must taste like apricots.

 

\-------------------------

 

John asks me to make tea.  He takes one teaspoon of sugar and just under 50 milliliters of milk in his favorite mug.  He steeps the bag for 4.8 minutes, will opt to microwave the mug (barbaric) if the temperature of the liquid falls below 80 degrees celsius.   He has a preference for  Lapsang souchong in the morning, Earl Grey in the afternoon and evening.

 

I make the tea. I use a generic bag of Tetley.  I don’t let the bag steep long enough, let it cool to 75 degrees celsius. I do it on purpose.  It’s weak, I pour too much milk, use too much sugar.  He grimaces when he drinks it, but doesn’t say anything.

 

He makes the tea from then on.  Boils the perfect cup.  Always makes an extra mug for me.  He doesn’t stir in as much milk as I typically pour for myself.  But, somehow, it tastes better when he makes it.  

 

\--------------------------

 

John’s fingertips overlap mine when he hands me pens, my mobile, glasses of water, alkali bases for various experiments.

Unintentional brushes.  He’s just being helpful, or worrisome, or any number of functional behaviors.  But I still ask him to bring me the mobile from inside the pocket of my jacket.  (My hands are busy.  Genomic DNA samples degrade at an alarming rate!)

 

John huffs, grumbles about, “Lazy, impossible,” underneath his breath, but he rolls off the couch and walks across the room to yank open the fold of my jacket in order to dig around.  He holds his head back so as not to affect my line of sight, I feel his breath against my neck.  

 

“Here,” He reaches toward me, mobile clutched in his palm.  I don’t take my eyes away from the microscope, I cup his hand so he can safely drop the phone, but my fingers close too soon.  We’re practically holding hands.  

I glance away from my sample, John’s brows knitted together, his eyes travel from where I’ve trapped him, to my wrist, all the way up to the pit of my elbow.

Right.  Personal space, boundaries.  Perhaps when I crowd into his space, over his shoulder, watching him peck away at his blog, that’s different.  Prolonged physical contact can be misconstrued.  Too intimate.   Mothers hold the hands of their children, crossing the street or in the market.  Lovers do the same.  I’m neither John’s child nor his lover.  

 

He clears his throat, uncurls his fingers.  The mobile slips into my hand, warm from where John has gripped it.  He walks back over to the couch.  The sun slips through the window, lights up the shades of grey, blonde, and the occasional strand that has a tint of copper, peppered along his scalp.

 

For a moment I forget about the DNA sample, slowly corrupting beneath the focus of my microscope.  But only for a moment.

 

\---------------------

 

“All right?”  John asks me.

I don’t answer.  I only stare out of the window of the train.  We’re still an hour from London.  The return excursion from Scarborough North Bay seems excruciatingly long without the promise of case at the end of it.  

 

John digs around in his pocket, removes two cereal bars.  Cinnamon Raisin and Cranberry Almond.  He tosses the latter to me, it lands against my chest with soft thump and begins to fall toward the ground.  It settles into my black shirt where a button gapes and causes a wrinkle.  

 

“I’m not hungry.”  I am.  But I don’t feel like listening to myself chew.  The air inside our cabin is stagnant and grating on my every last nerve.

“Don’t care.  Eat it anyways.”

“Give me yours.”  

“No, you’ll have the one I gave you.”

 

I don’t want that one.  I want the one you want.

 

“I don’t like cranberries.” Not necessarily true.   

John rolls his eyes.  Knows I’m goading him into an argument just so I’ll have something to do.  He’s being patient.  I’m being prattish.

“They’re hardly different from a raisin,” he counters, “That one has almonds in it, you need the protein.”  

John.  Considerate, never without a purpose.

I still want his cereal bar.

 

I swipe my hand across my chest, the bar dislodges itself and tumbles to the floor.  I reach out to take the cinnamon raisin.  Wait for the slide of the pads of John’s fingertips over my knuckles. the quick brush of warmth.

 

He tosses that cereal bar too, and the opportunity is lost.

 

\-------------------------

 

“Sherlock, what are these?”

You know what they are, John.  You went to medical school, you’ve dissected cadavers.  Yes, I’m keeping a cambro of bladders on the second shelf of the refrigerator, is that surprising?  He’s been living in 221B for nine months, three weeks, two days, and five half hours.   Human bladders are hardly the worst thing he’s found in there.  He thought the bag of frozen beaver tails particularly off-putting.

“I thought they were steaks!”  He raged, “Where did you even get these?” He shook the bag in his clenched fist, looked around the kitchen as if expecting tailless beavers to crawl out of the cabinetry and demand the reattachment of their appendages. They were contained, John, it couldn’t possibly have polluted the tub of coffee ice-cream.  I was careful.  Mostly.

(Although, admittedly, the jar of liquefying prawns did get a bit abominable there in the end.)

I  ignore him, purposefully.  He’ll say my name again, trying to get my attention.  Keep looking at the sample of _Vibrio Cholerae_ through my microscope.  My thumb strokes against the coarse adjustment, the focus is all wrong, but I’ve corrected it.  Mysterious cholera outbreak in a block of flats located in Croydon, fantastic!  Labelled as “accidental” contamination.  Hardly.

 

“Sherlock.”

 

Ah!  There it is again. My name.  Like it when John says my name.  My odd name, so often delivered in harsh tones.  Two dominant syllables, completely graceless.  John’s careful enunciation, giving due diligence to short vowel sound of the ‘e,’ his mouth rounding around the ‘aich’, shying away from the terminal ‘k.’

 

“ _Sherlock_ , what have you done with the remote?”  Fantastic!

“I’m going out for the shopping _Sherlock_ , need anything?”  Lovely.

“ _Sherlock_!  You can’t keep dissolving my toothbrushes in hydrochloric acid!  What can you possibly learn from that?”  Immeasurably brilliant!  (Also, a lot.)

 

“Sherlock! Are you even listening to me?  There’s a tupperware of bladders next to the milk.  Care to explain?”

 

He knows what I’m going to say, there’s a choice between two answers.

A) It’s for a case

B) It’s for an experiment

 

Perhaps he likes listening to me speak, too.  More probable that he simply feels that he has to draw attention to the matter as any typical person would.  Funny how John does this, follows the script for the sake of propriety.  I can tell from the set of his brow that he’s hardly bothered at all, if it genuinely upset him, the bladders would be gone as soon as he turned his back.  

 

He sighs, places the milk on a higher shelf, shuts the refrigerator door.  An olive jar rattles as the door seals.  (Why is that in there?  Neither of us eat olives.)

 

“Right.  Well, at least keep the bloody thing in the crisper next to the pig epiglottis.”

 

I will.  

John sets a glass of water beside my right hand, away from the bacteria samples.  Careful.  Doesn’t want a repeat of the Great Stomach Virus of 221B.  I grew bacterial cultures in our teacups.  It was perfectly safe.  I’m sure it was just a coincidence that we both developed stomach flu and spent the following 48 hours retching into anything with a drain function.  Sinks. Toilets.  Me, once, in a gutter after trying to make a go of it outside.  Mind over matter.  Didn’t work out.  John dragged me by the coat collar back inside and up the stairs, into the loo.  We spent the night there, together.  Waiting for the next, inevitable upheaval.

He made a pallet in the shower, I wrapped myself in a quilt and pressed my cheek into the ceramic tile, curled into myself on the bathroom mat.  It might have been nice, if it weren’t for our stomachs making a valiant attempt to claw their way out of bodies, into our mouths, and (hopefully) into the toilet.  

 

“John, fix this.”  I pleaded with him.  It was so boring.  Fever and nausea, my body insisting I hold still or risk setting off another fit.

“I can’t, Sherlock.  It’s a virus, you’ll have to wait for it to run its course.”

“You’re absolutely useless.  I thought you were a doctor.”  I was annoyed, sick, bored.  I didn’t mean it.  He knew.

“Maybe if you weren’t breeding the plague--”

“Don’t be ridiculous John, I was studying the correlation between person-specific pathogenic bacteria directly from a fingerprint, to that of another touched surface.  Such as a keyboard.”

Particularly the keyboard of one, John H. Watson.

“I’m sorry, but what does that have to do with growing said bacteria in our mugs!  You know, the ones we drink from?”

“Ugh.  Tedious.”  Not really.  In hindsight.  Perhaps a petri dish would have been the better choice.  Won’t admit it, though.  

 

I peered over at him from between my fingers.  His eyes were closed, skin clammy from fighting off fever and vertigo.  Ash blonde hair, damp and mussed from the humidity supplied by his fluctuating core temperature.  

 

“Drink that ginger beer,” he flicked his finger my way, he must have felt my gaze.  Always seems that way, like my line of sight is a physical thing pulling him into awareness. I refused to drink the Lucozade.  Electrolytes be damned.  The red dye was repugnant.

“I don’t fancy taking you to the clinic for IV fluids.”

“John, do you know that your hands carry their own signature bacteria?”  I was beginning to feel slightly dizzy.  

“Can we talk about it after we’ve finished vomiting up our very souls?”

“It’s your own unique blend,” I continued anyway, “I could recognize you from a scraping of the microbial colonization off your thumb.”

He paused for a moment.  I heard him shift in the tub, the light sheen of sweat causing his hands to catch against the slick surface.

“That’s.. nice.  I suppose.”

_Yes_!  He understood.  It was a compliment, John.  Your bacteria is interesting, and likely made us both sick.  You must have picked something up at the clinic the day I took the sample.  Norovirus has quite a long active period as a contagion.

 

“I could grow a microbiome of just you, John.”  Oh.  

Too far.  Embarrassing.  I’m inexperienced with this sort of relationship.  Never had a friend.  There’s Mrs. Hudson of course, Lestrade to an extent, but John is simply different within the prescribed context.  I have no idea why he should be.  

He coughed, laughed self-consciously, “I think you’re delirious.”

Yes, yes, delirious.  Ridiculous.  I did not intend for that to come across  as ludicrously sentimental as it seemed.

 

I didn’t have to qualify my comment after all, as if on cue, I scrambled from my spot to sprawl over the toilet bowl.  Undignified, the act of retching up bile.  My sick noises didn’t bother John.

 

I stood to brush my teeth, afterward.  Relocated (crawled) to a position just beside the bathtub.

“Light-headed?  You really ought to eat some of those soda crackers.”

I don’t think I responded with anything above some unintelligible grumbling.  I hated everything in the room.  Except John, he was the only good thing about the whole affair.  Later on he slipped the palm of his hand over the ledge of the tub and set it against my forehead, smoothed my tangles from where they stuck to my skin.  He was checking for fever, but couldn’t discern mine from his own.  

I kept complaining about being febrile, he kept swiping his hand uselessly across my face.  Every time a warm palm brushing away hair, pressing itself against my brow, or cheek, my neck once.  I’d broken all the thermometers ages ago in order to retrieve the mercury.

 

John can’t decipher me on the cellular level.  Nothing quite so literal.  

 

“Drink the water, Sherlock,” he tells me.  This glass sits next to the water cup he left for me last night.  Grey bits of dust particles float about, immersed and meandering.  Have I been at the bench all night?  Must have been.  My backside is numb, I need to stretch.  I keep adjusting the focus, exchange one slide for another, blink.  Light from the stage reflects into my eyes.  Photosensitivity.  

“You keep fondling your microscope like that, you might need to take her on a proper date.”  He stares at me over the edge of the paper.  

“A compound microscope is an inanimate object and not analogous to any gender,” but I still my fingers anyway.

“As much time as you spend with it, you ought to give it a name.  It’s like having an extra flatmate.”

“National Optical 163 Trinocular Microscope.”  

He laughs.  A perfect thing.  I make him laugh, “Linda.”

Terrible. John.  Completely generic.

“Lucretius.”  

How does he manage this?  Pulling me into illogical courses of conversation.  I follow him willingly.  He laughs again, sets his mug down.

“Jesus, what kind of name is--”

“Lucretius was a brilliant philosopher,” though I didn’t care much for his poetry, “He postulated the second law of thermodynamics, centuries before Carnot.  Committed suicide at 44, perhaps a less clever maneuver.”

 

“I think I’ll stick with Linda, actually.”  

 

“It’s not,” I say pointedly, slowly, “your microscope.”

 

“I certainly hope you weren’t in charge of naming the family pet.”

“Never had a family pet. ”  Not really.  Just the one.  And he was only mine.  Cream and stinking tuna and books along the garden shed.  A bullet into his chest.

“When I was nine, a tabby lived in the garden.”

I hear myself saying it.  I’m thinking about it, and I say it. Admitting this thing, to John.

 

“What did you call him?”

 

“Cat.”  

“Bit less creative than Lucretius.”

"I suppose, yes."

 

John smiles at me, shakes his head, looks back to his paper.  All straight white teeth, how the expression takes over his entire face.  The room feels warm.  Was it this warm, before?  The extra energy of another body, propelling the atmosphere into higher temperature?  John taking up space beyond the limits of his own body.  Holding a part of my attention, a conversation occurring through our combined kinetic energy.  A conversation I continue whether he’s physically available to reciprocate or not.  Helps me think.  And I’m always thinking.  

Although I much prefer a tangible John, as opposed to my figment John.  

 

He shakes his paper out, flips to the next section.  “Had a shelter dog once, Harry named it Loafer because it chewed its way through all of our school shoes the first day we had it.  Other than that, he was great.”

 

I stand up, crack my wrists and neck, reach up into the air to stretch my spine.  My nightshirt pulls up over my stomach, a rush of air against my navel.  Feels nice.  John looks over when he hears my joints popping, clears his throat and shifts his eyes away again, furrows his brow at the paper.  (What?)  Oh.  I look down to where my shirt has folded itself above a hipbone.  A blank slide, clinging to the edge of the cotton via static electricity. Use my fingertips to brush it off.

 

I pace over to the window, glance outside.  Pigeons perch on the sidewalk, bobbing their heads and tittering to themselves.  A brown moth has found its way inside the flat, it beats itself against the window pane, trapped, searching for a way out.  I’ll open the window and set it free before I take a shower.  

 

“My father killed Cat.” I’m abrupt, I say it too loud, I give myself away.  I wasn’t prompted for this sort of admission, but it comes out in spite of myself.   His shoulders go tense and his head shoots up, his attention immediately focussed.  I’m confiding in him, it’s obvious, I never talk about myself in this context.  He’s commented on it, before.  I’ve startled him.  

“Shot him when I was going out to feed him.”  I don’t know why I’m telling him.  I don’t want to tell him.  But I do.  I must, because I’m saying it. So expressive, John’s face.  

 

John frowns, the crease above his brow line deepening, “Why?”

I shift on my feet, suddenly uncomfortable.  Self-conscious.  Exposed.  I had begun this topic on a sudden whim to confide in him, but now it feels dangerous and I want to turn and shut myself behind the door of my bedroom.  My covert neediness, ugly and hungry for companionship.  It wants and wants.  

“He was meant to chase the mice from the greenhouse.  I began feeding him scraps, and he stopped.  He was no longer hungry, and therefore was no longer useful in his intended purpose.”

 

I watched it happen.  Watched father pull the trigger.  It was my fault.  A dish of cream, a neon sign of my claim over him.

 

John puts the paper in his lap, “That’s horrible.”

It was.

“It was perfectly logical.” I’m defending father.  Like mummy would.  Why am I doing that?

 

John’s face falls into something less discernible.  Not pity.  Not anger at another example of my utter indifference on life and death.  He looks like he’s just realized something.  What?  

“No,” he shakes his head, “Sherlock, no.  He shouldn’t have done that.  It wasn’t logical.  It isn’t even normal.  Jesus, no wonder..”  He doesn’t complete whatever it was he was about to say.  

He looks at me sternly.  But the expression isn’t meant for me.  It’s a scowl of an angry, retired, military doctor, mad at a man no longer alive to play recipient for such an expression.  

 

He feels defensive over me, has been from the start.  Why is that?  Do I bring it out in him?  Am I special, in this way?  (I can’t be.)  But maybe I am.  Which part of him do I feed?  The soldier, or the doctor.  Does he want to protect me, or nurture me?  It seems like both, all at once.  Didn’t think he would last longer than a month, honestly.  He keeps staying, even when I am callous and insulting toward him.  He chastises me, sometimes, but he doesn’t make fun. Dragged me out of a burning building just this week.  (I lost track of the blaze, I was still searching for evidence.) Forces me to drink ginger beer and eat bland crackers when I have viral infections.  I got sick on his shoes, and he stroked my cheek.  Just the once.  Or maybe he didn’t.  Maybe I imagined that.  I was pretty discombobulated.  

 

I wonder how different my life might have been if John had been a part of my childhood.  He shoots cabbies for me.  What might he have done if he’d found bruises on my ribs left by the fists of my own father?  Bloody lips and black eyes, the result of being pinned against gymnasium lockers and knocked about by a small crowd of classmates.

Adolescent peer pressure would have been severe for him to either choose to ignore or attack me.  Was he as forthright in his childhood as compared to his disposition as an adult?  

I was as much a pariah then, as I am now.  I didn’t really take the time to comprehend it then, and now I simply don’t care.  The childish need for connection evolving (devolving?) into detachment.  The vast majority of people are intolerably idiotic, why would their opinions matter to me?  Not John though, he’s an exception.

 

Well yes, he’s an idiot, too.  In comparison to my base of intellect.  But he’s not stupid.  It’s two different things, idiot, and stupid.  John is proficient, capable.  People like him.  Intelligent without being intimidating, clever and not cutting.  Sentimental but not soft.  Conceding but not submissive.  Almost, but not too.  As opposed to my everything, or nothing.  A set of mediums tempering my excesses.

 

I call him an imbecile.

He tells me I’m BrilliantFantasticIncredible.  

(He also calls me an insufferable bastard.  But only when he feels entitled.)

 

I shrug.  I can tell he wants to ask me things.  He has questions.  But he doesn’t push.

His lips twitch into a thin line, his jaw has a stubborn set.  Catch myself looking for a moment longer than necessary.  Why is that?  

 

I turn away, prepared to let out the brown moth, but he’s no longer fluttering against the glass.  

 

He’s fallen dead on the window ledge, dark and motionless against the paint.

I leave him there.

\-----------------------------------

 

John falls asleep in the cab during the ride back to Baker Street.  Fifty-two hours awake for a case and unable to function in the sudden deficit of adrenaline left by its resolution.  

Yellow light shines hazily from the street lamps, casting itself against the honey tones of his skin.  My shadow clings possessively to his collar, down his shoulder.  A big black slur wrapping around him, as sure as night.

 

John’s shin slips, falls against mine.  The transfer of warmth seeps through my trousers, past my skin, echoing into the marrow of my bones.

 

I count his respirations.  I don’t give thought to the hollow gnaw radiating outward from the center of my chest.

\------------------

 

_Clunk_

What the hell is that?  It’s three in the morning.  I was asleep..

_Clunk_

Shut up.

 

There are Jay birds in the flat.  I let them in here.  John will be furious.  He’s going to leave.

“Sorry John, they just flew in, I couldn’t stop them.”

John’s on the couch and the birds are pecking at his fingers.  His deliberately constructed hands, reduced to gnarled ribbons of bloody meat.

I’m sorry John.  How will you stitch me back together when all the flesh is missing off your hands?  I can see the metacarpal bones.  It’s terrible.  It’s fascinating.

_Garrulus Glandarius._  

“Another name for a colorful crow.”  Mycroft says, points the tip of his umbrella at John.  “They’re onto his eyes now, Sherlock.”

Bugger off, Mycroft.  How did you find your way in here to begin with?   Mrs. Hudson sealed the doors with globs of venetian plaster.  You’d never fit through the window.

 

John, did you know these birds mate for life?  By the book, these creatures.

Guess you don’t have time to appreciate their commitment to monogamy when they’re trying to poke out your eyes.  

“It’s all fine, Sherlock.  We can keep them.  Train them to be messenger birds, like the pigeons.”

That’s a brilliant idea, John.  It will be so helpful to The Work.  Mycroft can’t tap a bird like he can our phones.  (Can he?)  John.  Wonderful, resourceful, beyond reproach.  

“Don’t let them eat your eyes, John.”  They’re so blue.  Dark and flinty, warm and kind.  

“Come here, Sherlock.  If you kiss me, they fly away.”

Absolutely right.  

“Careful there, baby brother. He’s trying to trick you.”

Quiet, Mycroft.

John opens up his mouth, but no words come out.  Some inhuman sound.  The dull noise of something hitting itself against another surface.  

I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.  I haven’t learned that language yet, is it some ancient derivative of Dutch?

 

_Clunk_

Wait.

 

What?  Where’s John?  Where are the--

 

Oh, a dream.  Illogical. Disordered subliminal messages.  The rational mind working out God Knows What through the medium of an REM cycle.

_Clunk_

That noise, it’s coming from upstairs.  

John’s bedroom.  Is there someone up there, aside from him?  A woman?  

No.  He wouldn’t engage in intercourse in our flat.  (Irrational flare of jealousy)  No. He doesn’t bring home any of his dull, terrible, cookie-cutter, girlfriends.  

He might.  People do.  (John isn’t people.)  He hasn’t had sex in 2.5 months, and even that occasion was unsatisfactory.  (Likely because I texted him throughout.  Told him it was an emergency, to hurry up with his coitus.)  It was an emergency, the WiFi router wasn’t functioning properly.  Completely legitimate.

He came home smelling of floral perfume ( _Cashmere Mist_ ,  overtones of sandalwood and vanilla) and his hair was mussed on the left side. (Right handed lover, she was facing him.) His button up was only wrinkled a bit in the back, no telling signs of having been divested fully of his clothes.  Likely bilateral manual stimulation.  

Handing himself over to another person.  

I hated it.  

Perhaps I’d just hoped the sex was unfulfilling.  It would serve him right.  

 

He didn’t do anything other than satisfy a perfectly normal biological urge.  

It’s chemical.  I understand the science of the situation.  Even my honed ability to suppress a libido sometimes spills over into my blood, into my fingertips.  

 

Regardless.  I felt like I had a right to my frustration.  

 

_Clunk_

He’s very giving of himself.  John would be an attentive lover.  Probably takes the time to maneuver his partners to a soft surface before he takes them.  

I wouldn’t know how that feels.  I’ve only been fucked over bookcases and study desks.  My sexual history includes a total of eleven encounters, all with the same person.  And those weren’t necessarily reciprocal situations.

John:  His surgeon’s hands tangled up in long hair.  His nose nudged into the hollow of a shoulder, pressing himself into the heat of another body.

 

What must that be like?.  Pulling his trim, compact body against cool skin.  The burn of grey-blonde stubble against a cheek.  His even accent, forming its way around whispered curses of praise.  The clean, earnest scent of him.  Castile soap, sawdust, his natural organic components mixing with the environment.  Stumbling through the flat after cases, smelling like gunmetal and cracked frost.  The ruddy flush on his cheeks from the burst of adrenaline.

I wonder if it’s the same shade, creeping across his face and chest when he--

 

Oh.

 

No. Unequivocally _no_.  

But I--

 

_Clunk_

Fucking hell.  

Stupid.  

 

Fine.  I’ll just-- 

_Clunk_

There couldn’t possibly be a intruder up there.  I would have heard them on the stairs.  (John has a window in his room.) John also has an unparalleled habit of getting kidnapped.  He would have shot them with the gun hidden in his desk drawer.  

He might not have had time to load it.  He keeps the chamber devoid of any rounds ever since he’d caught me taking up target practice with Mrs. Hudson’s doorbell.  

 

I get up, slip my pyjama pants on.  Leave my shirt off, if there is an intruder the lack of leverage given by clothes will allow a tactical advantage.  (I hope it’s not that Lebanese assassin again.  His proclivity for curved edged swords at my throat was somewhat annoying.)

 

Creep out of my bedroom, down the hallway, can find the stairs in the dim light.  The clock in the sitting room.  The white noise made by the rotating click of the second hand, always reminding me of the constant shifting of time and my passage through it.

I set my foot to the right hand corner of the first step.  It’s the one one part of the step that doesn’t creak if pressure is applied to it.  The same goes for the third and fifth step.

 

I hear a muffled voice, obscured by distance and the solid heft of the door, I flatten my back against it.  Turn my head, push my ear against the cool slab of painted wood, still my breathing so I might hear more clearly.

 

It’s John speaking.  Frantic Dari phrases I don’t understand.  A language I am far from fluent in, never thought it would behoove me enough to allow it to take up space.  Mycroft has spoken Dari, Pashto, and the Farsi dialects since he was 18, he always had an inclination toward languages.  (The bastard.)  

 

_Clunk_

John’s PTSD, an unreachable scar imbedded into brain.  I can’t cure it for him.  

A psychosomatic limp, sure.  

But no surge of adrenaline will ever be potent enough to rid John of the images of the burning bodies of Afghan women and children.  The smell of tender flesh, blackened down to the bones.  A sudden insurgent attack while John’s unit was posted in an outlying village.  

The uselessness of his own hands trying to hold in a soldier’s blood at the femoral artery, his life inevitably draining away.

 

He doesn’t talk about it, not often.  

He hasn’t had an unconscious flashback in months.  When he first moved in, they dreams were incessant.  I could hear him yelling in his sleep.  I’d play violin.  Lull him back into wakefulness, his feet timid on the stairs after several minutes.  His hair sweaty, cheeks red.  I would face the window, as if I was playing to people passing on the street below.  Drunks just now coming home from the pub, mothers leaving the late shift in order to return to their children before dawn, lovers walking hand in hand.

 

The even cresting of John’s breaths, held in time to Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor.  

“That’s beautiful,” he told me after I’d finished.  His eyes were closed, I thought he’d gone back to sleep.  “Play another.”

 

I would.  Curve my shoulder into the chin rest, set the strings into song, hand myself over to muscle memory and the careful construction of flourishes.  The thrill of improvisation.

Would try a great deal of things to drive out the blood and smoke and the dying admissions falling from the lips of broken bodies, from the entrapment of John’s mind.  

 

I’ve not ever brought anyone comfort before.  There’s a sort of power in it.

 

Wait, what the hell is--

Something is breaking inside of John’s room, smashing glass, the shatter of it ringing out onto the hardwood, something being dragged.  Increase of blood flow to the amygdala, skin suddenly hot and oversensitive: Panic.

I wrench the door open, the room is dim aside from the gas light glow of street lamps.  The immediate sensation of cold air blasting across my chest, wind shifting through the follicles of my hair.  

He’s broken the window.  

Where’s John?  He could not possibly have jumped out.  (Could he?)  Oh god.

 

I climb over his empty bed, it’s the fastest route to the window.  Glass crunches underfoot, I’ll pick it out later.  I grab the windowsill, a sharp sting against my palm, I look down at the street.

 

There’s a chair down there, the one from the corner, broken to bits.  The duvet too, haphazardly clinging to the only intact chair leg. The air flooding in through the gaping window is damp, the cold insistent against my belly.

 

“John?”  I still myself, listen for his breathing, take my hands from the window.  I’ve cut my palm.  Blood slides warm between my fingers, drips softly onto the floor to slide across the shards of glass.

_Pat pat pat_

I clench my oozing fist.

Deep breath.  Walk back to the the other side of the room.

“John?”  It comes out as something straining between a whisper and yell.  If that’s even possible.

 

That night stand is not precisely where it ought to be.  It’s half a foot up and fifteen centimeters over from it’s usual spot.  I walk over to it, angling toward it with my shoulder rather than facing it completely.  A patch of darkness crouching between it and the bed.

A John sized patch of shadow.

Brief moment of confusion before I remember he’s in the throes of a particularly keen PTSD flashback.  He’s hiding.  

Oh, John..

I reach down to slide the night stand back from the wall before I realize how colossally unwise it is.  

 

An abrupt flurry of movement, the crash of the nightstand being flipped sideways against the door, and the breath being knocked from me as solid shoulders slam into my torso.  An undignified _unf!_ , the sickening crack of my skull against the floor.  My visions swims with disorientation.  I blink.

 

Thighs bracketing my hips, a hand pressed against my throat, the other pinning my wrist to the floor, John’s face above me.  His eyes feral and terrified, here, but not _here_.  He’s starting to restrict my air intake.  The threat of asphyxiation presents itself, a solid concept in the forefront of my mind.

 

I could break his hold.  Twist and hook a leg, use my free hand to punch my way out of his grasp.  

I wrap my bleeding hand around his wrist where he’s holding my throat.  I do so, slowly as I can manage, no sudden movements.  (Shouldn’t like to have a crushed trachea.)

 

“John,” I try, he presses down a little harder.  “John, listen to me.”  The words strain out.

 

He shakes his head.  His eyes clamp shut.

Breathe, John.  Breathe.

(I need to breathe.)

He hasn’t had a haircut in a month, his fringe sweeps against the middle of his forehead.

 

“You’re hurting me.” I manage in a pitiful squeak.

 

And that seems to do it.  His eyes flare in immediate recognition, and he gasps and gasps like he hasn’t breathed in days.

 

_“Oh my God_ ,” his voice is hoarse and scared, “Sherlock, Oh my God.”  His arms shake as they release me, he scrambles off of my stomach, only to roll me onto my side as I cough and sputter.  I gulp cold air, lungs burning with the sudden oxidation of my blood.

 

“You’re bleeding,” he says frantically, his hands roaming all over the bare flesh of my chest and back, “Where did I hurt you?  Christ, it’s fucking everywhere!”

What?  Oh, yes.  That.  I open the palm of my hand, stretch it out toward him.  His fingers shoot forward to grasp, gentling themselves before actually taking hold.  

“It wasn’t you,” I try to tell him between breaths, “I cut it on the window.”

John doesn’t take his eyes from where he’s stripped off his own cotton night shirt to press against the cut.  He fumbles about for the lamp, it fell off the nightstand, and somehow managed to not break.  It never even came unplugged.  The room floods with gold light.  I try to sit up.

“Don’t, wait--” He urges.  I sit up anyway, prop my back against the bed, he follows.

 

“Mrs. Hudson is going to take that out of the rent,” I tell him, “The window.”  He lifts the shirt to peak at the cut, blood immediately gushes, it saturates most of his shirt.  My blood is smeared across his chin, painted onto his arm and chest.

Victor liked it when I bled.  There was one memorable argument the deteriorated to the point where he struck me and split my lip.  Before I could retaliate he’d pushed me down to my knees and had his cock in my mouth.  Afterward, I wondered if he’d started the argument with that endgame in mind.  Fought with me, so that he’d have an excuse to hit me and make me bleed.

John holds my hand gently.

Ignores it all.  Focuses his attention on the need to soothe and heal the wound.  I can make out the starburst of scar tissue braiding itself across his shoulder.  The tissue is just now beginning to fade from a keloidal and angry red, into something lighter and filled in.  The skin there is shiny from the knitting together of damaged skin, the nerve endings flayed open, burned away.  He could have died.  (Sudden burst of grief at the thought.)  

 

“This is deep, Sherlock,” he runs the tip of his middle finger over each side of the split, “I think there might still be glass wedged in there. I’m so sorry.”

“Your apology is not necessary.”  It isn’t even logical.  I don’t expect you to defy the unconscious programming left by post traumatic stress.  It is a well-documented form of mental illness, I’m acquainted with the symptoms.

“It needs stitching.”  His voice sounds small.  John and his endlessly expressive face.  I can practically hear his thoughts.  His unnecessary guilt.  His bright concern.

“The chair and your duvet, they’re on the street.  Why did you throw them?”

“Doesn’t matter.  I’ll get them in the morning.  Can you put pressure on this while I fetch my kit?”

 

I put my hand over his, waiting to take over.  He shivers.  Slides his hand away, darts out of the room.  

It’s fine, John.  I’m fine.  Hands tend to bleed profusely, all those veins, blood vessels so close to the surface.  

 

Ah, yes.  Well.  That is a bit deep.

I prod at the torn flesh with a finger, trace the slice.  Hard to determine the depth of it through all the mess.  Crimson continues welling up, slicking the pad of my finger, seeping into my nail beds.

 

“Idiot!  Quit touching that,” he shouts at me, rushing over, “What part of ‘keep pressure on it’ do you not understand?”

“Only wanted to see--”

“Christ,” John sits back onto haunches, his fingers coming up to touch his brow.  They shake ever so slightly, “Your lovely, _fucking_ , hand.” And he reaches down to bat my fingers away, resuming his expert hold.  He drags the lamp closer to where we sit propped against the side of his bedframe.

 

My lovely what?

 

“I only have lidocaine aerosol, it’s not going to help much.”

I shrug.  I’ve held still through unmedicated stitches before.  Unpleasant for sure, but not intolerable.

“It’s going to sting quite a bit.  I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologising.”

“We can go to an A&E.  An anesthetic--”

“Quit fretting over it.  I trust you’ll leave me with full use of the limb by the time you’re finished, doctor.”  I taunt him a bit, watch as some of his unease slips away from the set of his shoulder.

John purses his mouth into a thin line.  Unwraps the suture kit from it’s sterile packaging, threads the eye of the semicircular needle, sets it aside.  He works his fingers into latex gloves, the stretch of material snaps around his wrists.

“I need to check for glass.  Have to clean the cut before I can close it.”

I nod, lean my head against the top of the mattress to stare at the ceiling.  Discoloured plaster, a crack beginning to settle into the far left corner.  

A shrill scraping sound, nearly too soft to hear, metal tweezers against glass.  A sharp sting as John lifts the shard from where it has burrowed into my flesh.  He deposits it in a plastic mouthwash cup, uses the very tip of his index finger to check the lay of flesh.  

“Just checking to see if there are any larger bits left.  Ah--”  his finger rests momentarily, “It’s worked its way past the cut.  Try not to flinch.”  

Found itself a home underneath my less damaged skin, then.  I breathe in sharply as John reaches in with the tweezers, digs lightly, “Almost--” he tells me.  

“Fuck, get it out already!”  I snap at him, “It’s a sliver of glass, not a bloody excavation of Mayan ruins.  Hurry up!”

_“Sh_!”

Another shift of glass and metal against raw flesh, “There we are,” and he holds up the shard clenched between the tweezers.  It glints in the lamplight, transparent and red.

 “Your body will push out any of the smaller bits after a while.  Let me clean this up and I’ll suture it closed, yeah?  You need a glass of water or anything?  I think we’ve run out of paracetamol, I’ll ask Mrs. Hudson--”

I look at him and roll my eyes.  “Your simulation of a mother hen is disturbingly realistic.  Shall I toss you some kernels, or might we save your brooding for later?”

John huffs a breathy laugh as he gathers disinfectants, “Prat,” and begins tearing open alcohol and betadine swabs.  “Right, here we go.”

 

A chilled swipe against my palm and--

_Bloodybuggeringfuck_ that _burns_ , that’s horrible.  Does the sterilization of open wounds always feel this unpleasant? Just let it get infected John, I don’t care.  I’ll wear a glove over it.  I’ll have a diseased hand that rains tiny slivers of window pane all over London.  I hiss and flinch, focus on the crack in the ceiling.  Another swipe, I prepare for the loathsome sensation of antiseptic burning the potential contaminants from my skin, but--

Cool air glides over my outstretched palm, soothing and confusing the firing nerve endings pried open by the wedge of glass.  I blink and look down.  

John’s lips pursed into an “ _Oh_ ,” the top of my hand cupped in his palm.   He takes a breath, and gusts his sigh across the laceration.  Another pass of an alcohol wipe over my open fist, sharp burn, and another mollifying breath sent across the torn flesh.  The wisps of his exhalation breaking against my bare chest.

 

I can feel my pulse in my throat.

 “What are you doing?”

 

John finishes his palliative effort, reaches for the q-tip soaked in orange betadine, “Didn’t your mum ever blow on your nicks?”

An impractical means of assuaging pain, pacifying emotional needs rather than pragmatic ones.  (Works.)

“Exhaling on an open wound heightens the risk of introducing new bacteria.”

“You’re right,” a corner of John’s mouth shifts upward, almost a smile.  I am consumed by the illogical, but overwhelming need to touch it. Want to rub my thumb across the contours of his thin lips, the expressive edges, the steadfast line of his jaw.  “If it gets gangrenous, and falls off, you can blame me.  How does that sound?”

“No.”

“I doubt it will come to that,” he assures, rubs the betadine over the separation and tosses it away in exchange for his suturing needle.

“No, my mother did not blow on my nicks.”

“Oh,” he pauses, brow furrowed as he looks into me, scans the depths of my palm as if I’ve hidden all the answers there.  The needle poised over the line of damage, “Oh.”  He makes a noise deep inside his throat, breathes in through his nose, “Tell me if you need me to stop.”

I nod, steel myself, begin balancing an oxidation reduction reaction under hypothetical acidic conditions.  The needle pierces the healthy skin surrounding the cut, I don’t grimace until I feel the pull of thread through the freshly created hole.  I see John’s hand rise in my peripheral, he gives a slight tug to bring the split together, the muscles of his hand given over to the creation of a perfect surgeon’s knot.  He cuts the twine, re-threads the needle.

Simple interrupted stitch technique.  More time consuming, but less chance of the entire line of suture unravelling if one stitch were to fail.  

“What did your mum do?  Professionally speaking.”  He asks after the next stitch is in place and he secures the knot.

“She was an econophysicist.”  For a while.  I hardly remember her working in the field at all.   By the time I was born, her illness had already begun to seep into her mind like black tar, obscuring everything she touched.

“I’m not exactly sure what that is, but it sounds impressive enough.”  

“Statistical finance, stochastic processes.  Not really my area.”  An understatement.  I leave the economy to Mycroft.

 

John lances the median of the laceration where it gapes the mosts, air hisses through my teeth.

 

“And your father?”

“United Nations delegate in the EcoSoc committee.”  Devoted alcoholic, indiscriminate philanderer.  My mother the melancholic, my father the spectrum abuser.  Both geniuses within their own right, and likewise undesirable.  My pedigree of untouchableness, written into my very genes.

“I didn’t get on with my dad either,” John meets my eyes briefly before settling into the next stitch.  “He had a way with the bottle,” I figured (knew) as much, “Wasn’t violent.  Wasn’t anything, really.  He lived off what my mum made working double shifts at the hospital.  One night he told Harry he was off out to do the shopping, which was bollocks since I’d never once seen him do the shopping, and he didn’t come back.”  

Square knot, firm pull, quick puff of cool breath against my skin when he feels me flinch.

“One more.  I’ll put a gauze dressing over it when I’m finished so the ends don’t catch.” he says before continuing his story.  “Police were on our doorstep a year later, drunk bastard had walked himself in front of a bus.  Must have been a right mess, that.  Harry took it poorly, went to the funeral, mum and I stayed home and watched a Twilight Zone marathon on telly.”  He wipes at his brow with the underside of his forearm,  “I didn’t really grieve him, I hardly even knew the man.  I grew up with the absence of a real father, maybe that’s why it didn’t strike me so.”

He laughs softly, “I know you’ve probably deduced all of that for yourself by now.”

“Then why even tell me?”  Slick twine through my skin, blood wells up only to be dabbed away with gauze, “If you knew I wouldn’t be accessing any new information, why bother?”

He pauses, sighs, cuts the twine, “Sometimes it’s nice just to have it said out loud, Sherlock.”  He holds my wrist and brings my palm up to examine the seam.  Stitches as allowably small as he could make them without fear of the whole row being pulled apart by my inevitably careless movements.  No blanching of the skin at the knots.  Impeccable work.  He pulls off the latex gloves tinged all over with blood.   

“Shit.  It’s going to leave a mark.  Fucking unavoidable, I’m sorry.”

How does he do that?  Formulate his grief into something he is objective toward, something containable?  All this emotional baggage he carries as a part of his essential being, no different than an arm or a leg.  How can he stand it?  I can’t imagine what it would be like to accept myself as a whole, rather than bits and pieces that must be kept separate and at a distance.  The whole idea seems impossible.  John begins wrapping soft gauze around my palm, suitable tightness to keep the pressure stable without cutting off circulation.

“He would get violent.”  My father, I mean.

Can’t bring myself to say more than I already have.  A cold draft finds its way through John’s broken window, but it settles like heat against my oversensitive skin.  I watch John’s eyes narrow as he works on dressing my wound, lips tight.  His voice comes out quiet, edged rough with apprehension.  Wanting more explanation, fearful of the possibilities.

“Did he…  Would he..” he starts, stops, takes a deep breath, “Be.. that way.  With you.”

 

My mouth is full of silence.  Couldn’t answer, even if I wanted to.  A verbal admission would make it reality.   _Yes_ , doesn’t even form itself on the tip of my tongue.  My reticence is just as obvious.  Stuck between denial and declaration.  John doesn’t need an audible confirmation to solidify his suspicions.  

I get caught in the reassuring movements of John securing the sterile dressing.  The solid presence of his right hand where it grasps my forearm, the confident dance of his dominant left hand laying the bandage.

 

“Is he--uh--still alive?”  

“Myocardial infarction.  Fatal.”

“Mmh.”  He sounds disappointed, a missed opportunity to kill a man that deserved it.  Feel a corner of my mouth twitch into a something akin to a smile.  So defensive, my John.

“There we are, that ought to do it,” he cups my hand again in both of his, “I know it’s asking a lot, but try not to knock it about too much.”  His thumb rubs absently across the column of my wrist, my heart slams into chaos. (He’ll let go soon, I’ll have to go back to my room.)  I lean forward, John’s unconscious magnetism, drawing me in.

“I’ll clean and re-dress it tomorrow, can’t risk you picking up some sort of infection.  You all right?”  He runs his hand over the gauze, gentle.  So close, our faces are so close..  The lingering scent of spearmint toothpaste, rich undertones of olive oil from his Castile soap, the chemical composition of John catalysing my PAM enzyme, which triggers the release of peptide hormones, resulting in a rush of oxytocin.     _Oh god._

“It’s fine,” I don’t recognise my voice.  Husky, shaking.  Panic and arousal reticulated.  Terrible.  Wonderful.  Horrible. _I can’t._

 

I’m sorry John.  I’m sorry, I didn’t know.  You really ought to run now.  

Please don’t go, please don’t.

He licks his lips, a quick swipe of pink.  (Really?  Now?)  Stop, John, just stop.  I can see your tongue, I see it, alright?  It’s very clever and I’m sure it’s perfectly wet.  I see it touching your bottom lip approximately 47 times throughout the course of the day.  The number doubles when you’re experiencing stress.  I slip tubes of chapstick in your pockets during cases for that reason exactly.  

 

John looks up, hand still laid protectively over my bandaged wound.  His eyes go wide at my proximity, surprise, alarm, concern.  He swallows, I mimic.  Ignore me, John.  Don’t see whatever it is you see written across my face.  

“It hurts.”  He whispers.  

His gaze flicks down to where he’s grasping me, up the line of my arm.

 

He’s looking at my mouth.  The air pulls tight around me.  

“John, I--”

Sudden burst of kinetic energy, his kit being knocked over by a knee (his).  Me, grabbing him by the hair, pulling him into my lap.  

“Your hand, Sherlock!  Your hand!”  He snatches the injured extremity.  Suddenly unbalanced, we topple sideways, my back flat on the hardwood.  John pins the injured extremity above my head, not to control, not to restrain:  So I won’t hurt it all over again.  He climbs over me, fits himself there, can feel his cock press against my hip through the combined barrier of our thin pyjama bottoms.  Want to pull the strings, push the worn cotton over his hips. ( Also want to spread him out across the floor and examine his very pores.)  But my body surges ahead of my mind.  Wanting touch, not confused over it at all.  No time to think about the consequences.  Inexplicable compulsion to smear my body all over John’s, and vice versa.  Decrease in metabolic activity to the cerebral cortex, inhibiting--

 

His mouth.  His mouth on mine. _God_. Oh God.

 

Never been kissed like this, all of his attention thrown into the act.

A groan: Mine.  Rapidly lowering inhibitions due to rush of adrenaline.  My mouth is open, panting and kissing at the same time.  (Oxygen constriction in the best possible way.)

John’s head dipping toward my neck, tip my head back.  He sucks the skin at the hollow of my jaw, kisses my throat, bites lightly.  Christ.   Unexplored touch receptors exploding to life:  Erogenous zone.  (Had no idea it felt like _that_ )  

Hips buck up, chasing his heat, John’s sharp intake of breath.   He reciprocates the friction, drops his pelvis to grind against mine.  

“ _Oh my god_ ,” he groans into my neck, voice breaking.  I risk splaying my hand across the bare expanse of his back, scrape my nails down his spine, cup his hip.  Press down, roll my body against him.

Perfect, lovely. John.

Am desperate for him to kiss me.  Can I ask for that?  Should I not talk?  Try to twist my face to where he’s buried his mouth at the dip of my throat.

“Please, John--”

He does a half press-up, releases my injured hand, rushes upward to press our mouths back together. Rubs his lips (soft) against the bow of my upper lip, pulls away, replaces his mouth with his thumb. His eyes follow where he traces me, catches the blunt points of my maxillary central incisors.

Flick tongue against his thumb: Suck. Release.  John swallows, breath stuttering on the inhale.     Rests his weight on his right side (no nerve damage to affect his range of movement), cups the back of my neck with his left hand, licks into my mouth.  (John’s tongue, hot and wet, dexterous.)  Been over a decade since I’ve been kissed, never long enough, and never like this.  John kisses me like he can’t get close enough. ( I utterly lack technique, was never allowed to learn.  Counterset lack of experience with extreme eagerness.)  

I arch into him, bracket his head with my hands, cup his ears, pet the nape of his neck.  Mimic the way he sucked my tongue just a moment ago.  

“Sherlock--”

Yes!  That. Yes, my name.  Better than Christmas, my name on John’s tongue, cut through with his arousal.  (When did that happen?  When did he.. _this?_  Was my mind too busy attempting to suppress a libido to notice?  And what of his now-ambiguous heterosexuality? )

Pull my leg up over his hip, rock against him. Someone makes a noise:  Low, desperate, fervent.  (That’s me. Damn, it’s me, my voice.) Vowels emerge from the back of my throat and get lost in the crush of our mouths.  

It should be humiliating, whimpering like a schoolboy, but it’s not.  It’s not.

John likes it.  Every time I moan, he compresses himself against my body that much harder.  

“God, I want you,” he tells me against my lips.

 

Why, John?  Why?  

I should stop.  Should be able to.

I can’t stop.

 

“Up,” John slides his hand underneath me, down to the small of my back.  His fingers fit precisely in the carve of my spine.  “Bed, please Sherlock.”  He gathers me up against his chest, leans back to pull me with him.  Doesn’t work out.  I’m too ignited through with wanting. The space between the floor and the bed seems impossibly distant, uncrossable. It seems too intimate. Beds are for lovers.  Probably why I’ve never managed to work my way onto one.  I’m not the type.  I can’t offer more than this, can barely even share the body I have.

I follow him up, only to push him into a sitting position against the bedframe where he stitched my palm shut not three minutes prior. Shove his pants down over his hips, onto his thighs.  Crawl into his lap, straddle him there.  (Our height difference puts his face into my neck.  Best possible location.)  Prop the heel of my gauze clad hand against the ledge of the bed, nudge my brow against his forehead, wrap my uninjured hand around the length of his cock, stroke him slowly.  His breath shatters in his chest, eyes slam shut, and open wide just as quickly.  Looks at me, sees me watching him.

 

Right.  I’m not supposed to do that, (have my eyes open) not here.

Victor said so.

_“How am I supposed to fuck you when you’re burning holes through my skull?  It’s freaky.”_

I, very much, want John to fuck me.

 

“Stop, stop,” John brushes the palm of his hand over the line of my brow, smoothes the crinkle of skin at the bridge of my nose, “Why would you do that? Look at me.”

 

The dusky blue of John’s eyes, barely discernible from his expanded pupils.  

His hands move, but he keeps his eyes focussed into mine.  (Knows I want to see,  Always see.) Feel his fingers slip the knot on the tie of my pants, put both hands behind his head, lift my hips, (breathing too quickly) allow the cloth to be tugged down past my iliac crest.  John gentles his motions, hands come around my waist, (slow, too slow) moulds his palms against my coccyx, pushes my clothes over the swell of my bottom, away from my cock.  Catches my lower lip in his teeth, bites softly.  Touch the tip of my tongue against his:  Roll them together.  Press forward with my hips: Friction.  Caught between my stomach and John’s.  Not enough, also too much.   Do it again.  Want more.  (Would never last long enough, can feel climax already lighting at the base of my spine.)  

 

John’s lips on my ear, sucks on the lobe.  God. Perfect.

He grabs my good hand, licks the palm, lowers both of our hands down between our legs where our cocks are touching.  

 

Wrap my hand around our erections, his fingers over mine.  Eyes still locked together, his jaw tipped up defiantly.  Daring me to look away.  Our fists move in sync, unhurried at first.

Except no, except my voice strains out from behind my teeth even louder than before. My shoulders move up and down, agonizingly slow, as I work my fist around our damp cocks.  His hand on my hip, pressing in at the tips, supporting my undulations.  (Wants to fuck me, too.  He’s thinking about it.  Encouraging the imitation of what I would look like sliding up and down on his cock.)  I shiver.  

 

John’s gaze, a physical connection, pinning me to him.  

Can’t even begin to comprehend the noises I make.  The white noise of wind drafting through the broken window.  The linen curtains snapping in the bitter,shifting breeze  John panting, swearing, “Fuck,” and “Sherlock.”  

 

My orgasm finds me, unanticipated, fantastic. Everything goes dark for the span of 2.5 seconds, and I’m coming.

I’m choking on words, John’s name, air itself. Autonomic nervous system stimulating the release of neurohormones.  It shakes me apart at the seams, breaks me and reconstructs me, only to be dragged under by another spasm.  My body shakes, I’m gasping and gasping.  Spilling hot over our hands and chests. _Please._

Open my eyes, mouth lax in surprise and satiation. I only re-establish eye contact long enough to see John tip his chin down to look where our hands overlap around our pricks.

 

It only takes three more rough tugs.  Me: Shuddering with oversensitivity, and John curls his forehead into my shoulder, bites down on the ridge of my bicep as he comes.  

 

I want to fall into his lap and clean the mess with my tongue, but John’s arm is like a steel rod across my back.  Clinging to me.

 

Hugging me.

 

Oh.

 

His hands strokes between my shoulder blades, cups my scapula and caresses the sharp edge of the bone with his fingers.

 

Rubs his lips over the spot where he bit my shoulder, licks the pleasant sting of it away.  

 

We’re both still panting.  He reaches up to kiss me again and--

 

No.

NO.

 

I shove backward, shove him away, pull up my pyjama pants.  (What have I done?)

 

“Sherlock, what--”  His brow raised in alarm, palms turned up before he starts scrambling to his feet.  Pulls up his pants.

 

“Wait, hold on!”  He reaches out, grasps the wrist of my bandaged hand.  “Whatever it is you’re about to--” I wrench my wrist from his grip, “ _Jesus_ , Sherlock, what the hell is wrong?”

 

I whirl around, furious.  Furious at John for breaking the bloody window in the middle of the night.  For the hundreds of grazing touches over tea and the casual passing of miscellaneous items.  For the moments following difficult cases, with him propped against the wall of our flat, looking at me as if I’m something impossibly worthwhile.  For apricot jam. I hate apricots!  

 

“What’s wrong with having seeds in your jam?!” I shout at him, as if it’s something he’s done on purpose.  Prevented me from having raspberry jam on my toast, prefers jams from the Prunus species just to be arbitrary.  I don’t even know what I’m saying.  I’m not angry with him at all.  Not him.  But I shout at him anyway.

 

“Jam?!  You--  We just-- ” He yells back me, gestures frantically between us, “What are you bloody on about?”

“You,” I stalk toward him again, “I never wanted this!”

John’s face:  Hurt, confusion, concern.  

 

And I resent all of it.  Resent it and crave it, viciously, equally.  My paradoxical beckoning and shunning of John’s comfort.  

 

I mean to wrap my hands around his throat, I mean to throttle and hurt and tear and bruise, but my fingers thread into the hair on the occipital portion of his skull, drag his face toward mine.  Tilt his head up. Duck and press my mouth against his, bite his lip, lick into his mouth.  Shove him away.  He looks at me like I’ve really lost it this time.  He looks at me like he wants to snatch me by the scruff of my neck and kiss me again.  The dried blood from my hand is still painted across his body.  My own arm is red with it.

 

 Blood and sweat and come everywhere.  A veritable pantheon of incriminating evidence.  

 

“I don’t want to talk about it!” I shout as I slam his door behind me and bolt down the stairs to my bedroom.

 

Lean against the door.

 

And breathe.  And breathe.

 

\--------------------

 

When I was thirteen Mycroft and I went to France with mother.  We were there to visit her family home in Camargue.  Her father was long dead, and Grandmere was succumbing to the final stages of emphysema.  I remember the portable oxygen tank, the clear tubing running around her neck, over her ears, under her nose.  Her eyes were cloudy with old age,but discernibly green, like the sea, a singular fleck of gold lodged in the iris.  

I don’t know why Mycroft came.  There was no reason.  Perhaps to watch mother, ensure she didn’t leave the cottage one evening to wade out into the water and be taken under.  It had been a bad month.

A large, white, cottage overlooking the mouth of the bay, and the empty barn house full of spiders.  The only neighboring cottage was boarded up, falling apart.  A mother had drowned her two children in the bathtub, then shot herself.  I breached a window to look inside.  All the blood had long since flaked away, leaving only the garish floral wallpaper peeling up from where it should have been glued.  No one ever re-took the space.  They let honeysuckle and ivy overtake the rotten beams.  Storms since had flooded the rooms, grey water flowing through the windows, seeping into the cracks.  All evidence of life washed back out into the bay.  There was nothing left to prove that the space once held the laughter of children.

I stood just past the shore, next to Dead Tree.  I only called it that because I never remembered a time when the tree bore leaves or alive things.  No lovers carved their names in the wood, no birds sought purchase on its branches.  The wind pushed from the bay sings past the form, unnoticed, there was nothing left to rustle, nothing to resist the wind’s insistence.  The salt from the water petrified Dead Tree, made it unable to fall down on its own.  The bark peeled off like crepe paper, leaving smooth wood, the color of ash, underneath.

 

I went to the  bay, looked out over it. The water was always too muddy to swim in, I tried anyway.  Sunk into the black muck up to my shins while the tide rose around me.  Took me ages to make my way back to the shore, covered in sticky mud, reeking of sweat and the lurid odor of brackish water.

 

Mother was standing with Mycroft under Dead Tree, wrapped in a white shawl, it clung to her narrow shoulders.  Her hair flew about her face, stuck to her lips, caught in her eyelashes.  

Mycroft rolled his eyes when he saw the state of my clothes.

“You’re a mess,” she told me, smiled a little, scraped her fingernail against some dried mud on my forearm.  “I certainly hope you plan on washing before dinner.”

 

“Of course.”  

“You smell like a crayfish.”  Mycroft sniffed, and wrinkled his nose.  

“Hardly, crayfish only inhabit freshwater.”  

“All the same.”  

 

It was a game of mine, annoying Mycroft.  So I wrapped myself around him, smeared the muck against his trouser leg, shook the sweat from my hair, while he tried prying me from the disgusting embrace.

“Absurdly juvenile,” He snarled, as I tried to climb over his back.  

“And you’re as tiresome as a Sunday service,” and we toppled to the ground in a fit of childish wrestling.  It was a game, it was only a game.  We weren’t really fighting.  We were both relieved to be away from school, away from Father, away from the enforced silence of our home.  

 

We stopped our grappling when a choked noise came from above us, we stopped mid roll, hands on each other’s collars.  Looked up to see mother crying, staring out past the bay.  Crying and crying, fingers blanched white from gripping her shawl, her face contorted and strange.  We scrambled up to her.  

 

“Mummy, we weren’t really fighting,”  I tried to tell her, took her hand in mine.  She withdrew it like my touch was a corrosive thing sent straight through her skin.

She slapped me across my cheek.  It stung.

“Sometimes I wish I could watch you bleed to death,” She hissed.  Then dissolved back into tears.

I tried reaching out to her again, “Mum,” I said softly.  Desperate to bring back the woman who smiled at my muddy clothes just a moment before.

 

Mycroft grabbed me by the elbow, wrenched me away from her.

 

“Sherlock don’t, don’t,” he said into my ear, “She isn’t well.”

 

I pulled out from his grip, ran back to the shoreline, unable to stand it.  

 

There was no bustle of human existence surrounding me.  Only the croak of water-fed toads, the churning of waves, the flap of the breeze from the bay, and the wanton call of gulls.

 

I shivered, the air was briny on my tongue, I steadied my breath.  In and out, in and out, to the breaking of waves against the shore.  The ever moving water acting like a metronome for my lungs.  I wanted to spread myself across the sand, stretch out over the water.  Observe the change of the world, always different from one millisecond to the next.  Information rapidly spiraling into decay, the remnants feeding the life of something else.  The cycle of it was reassuring, the continuity made my head spin.  

 

The waves eroded the shore.

I looked out over the water.  

The fog and the grey sea, the firmament smudged and intertwined.

  
  
  
  
  
  
 


	6. Symposium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You going to sleep, then?” John asks after awhile.
> 
> “I can’t.”
> 
> He frowns, “You don’t want to?”
> 
> “I can’t.” 
> 
> He licks his lips, regards me. We lie staring at one another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **insert usual trigger warnings here**
> 
> (Took me longer to post than intended, what with Christmas holidays and all.) enjoy!

\------

Standing in the shower, hot water sluicing down my neck and stomach, my arms and legs.  Rinsing off old blood and.. everything else.  I still could smell John all over me, for hours afterward. His clean masculinity, I let it fill my nose until I couldn’t bear it a moment longer.  Sitting on the cold wood floor, back against the door, didn’t sleep.  (Didn’t try.)  Heard him pacing in his room, he didn’t sleep either.  He came downstairs to fetch a broom, stood propped against my doorway for 33 seconds.  Listening for me. I stared at his shadow from the crack underneath the door. He took a shower, scrubbed all evidence of me away.

He’ll leave.  God, he’ll leave.  He’s probably upstairs packing his bag right now.

Haven’t the faintest idea what I am supposed to say when I see him.  (If I see him.)  

Should probably strike preemptively.  It’ll be easier that way.  A clean cut.  Right down the middle.  A palm, sliced open: Mine.  John’s fingertips pressed into the hollow of my hips.  His lips over mine, his teeth against my neck.  Bliss.

 

Stop.

Stop thinking about that.  It doesn’t change anything.  Doesn’t change me.

 

I’ve gotten the blasted gauze bandage wet.  Should have wrapped it in plastic.

 

\-------

 

I make coffee, I don’t make John a cup.  

His feet on the stairs, clearing the fifth step, the wood creaks under his weight.  (Approximately 165 pounds, give or take 5 pounds in either direction.  Accounting for hydration levels, changes in diet.  John’s solid weight spread over me, pressing me into the floor--)

 

This is not an opportune moment to relive that memory.

 

Not with John clearing the landing and walking in my direction.  I unfold the paper, stare at words that don’t even make sense.  

John’s hair is  mussed and sticking up in the back.  Must have laid down while it was still wet from showering.

 

He clears his throat.  I wait for it, the two words.  I’m leaving.

I’ll shrug and act like it’s of no consequence to me.  None at all.

 

“Coffee?”

 

What.

I shift my eyes over the paper as he moves into the kitchen, refills the kettle.  Rummages around the pantry.  What’s he playing at?  John isn’t the type to drag out painful conversation, postpone the inevitable.  

He emerges from the kitchen with an apple, settles in his typical seat around the table from mine, opens up his laptop.  I don’t look at him.

 

“How’s your hand?  You didn’t wet the stitches, did you?”  John begins his two finger plucking at the keyboard.  (Dreadful typing form.  How does he manage composing entire blog entries like that?)  Looks over the screen, waiting for me to answer.  

 

“I’m perfectly capable of wound management.” I try to sound contemptuous.  I am. I don’t want John’s concern, or his kindness.  His misguided allegiance.

Well, I do.  But I don’t.

 

He sighs, resumes his unskilled pecking, “I’ll have a look at it later.”

Fine.  If John wants to be cruel and drag this out, he can try.  I am quite adept in provoking him, by now.  I take a deep breath, prepare a string of insults.  It shouldn’t take much to--

 

“No,” he looks at me again, brow furrowed, “Nope.  I know that face.  You’re about to say something completely awful.”  He closes his laptop, rests his elbows on the table and points at me.

What face?

Narrow my eyes, try to start again, “Honestly, John--”

He leans across the table and claps a hand over my mouth.  I watch his pupils dilate slightly when I huff air against his palm.

“And _definitely_ not before I’ve had coffee.  Christ.”  He lowers his hand and rests back into his seat, scrubs the palms of both of hands over his face and through his hair.

“I know you said you don’t want to talk.  About it.  And you don’t have to.  So listen, just for a minute, and then you can go about your day.  Alright?”

I remain silent.  

“I’m not angry with you.”  

The room stays quiet and still, it’s raining this morning.  I hope John covered his broken window.  The damp will set in, regardless.  He can’t sleep in a cold, wet, bedroom.  He’ll catch fever.

“Confused, yes.  Some mixed signals, there.  But I’m not angry, and you should know that.  I’m only worried I was too caught up with--you--um..”  His eyes flick down to look at my mouth.  He blinks hard and shifts to look away, “If you felt pressured, in any way at all, I’m sorry.  I should have asked.”

 

Pressured?  By John?  I thought my approval, at the time, was entirely clear.

 

“So.  Now we can go about not talking about it.  If that’s what you want.”

I don’t know what I want.  The things I want don’t make sense.  It isn’t logical to want lay across John on the sofa.  It isn’t logical to want to be able to touch him freely, without the excuse of passing pens and papers.  I’ve never done these things, not with anyone, I doubt my own capability.  I get bored.  I’m inconsiderate.  Sociopathic tendencies, and all.

I still want, regardless.

Want to lie in a bed with John.  Slot our fingers together.

They’re just gestures, it shouldn’t matter.  A hundred different points of contact, a hundred different ways to be hurt.  

 

“Will you leave?”  I need to know.  Need to hear it, one way or the other.

John scratches at the back of his neck, looks sad, “Hold on.  Are you asking if I am _going_ to leave, or are you asking me _to_ leave?”

 

“Are you going to leave.”  I specify.

John levels a steady gaze, “Do you want me to?”

 

A long moment, unsure how to answer in a way that doesn’t sound like I am admitting to something far more complex.  I shake my head.  No.

I can’t give words to the things I want.

 

He nods, a quick tuck of his chin, “Kettle’s boiled.”

 

\-----

 

“Robert Cooper, 43 years, estate law attorney working at a London firm.  One round to the head, killed while he was asleep.”

“Obviously.”

Lestrade rolls his eyes, “No sign of break in.  Nothing taken.  Whoever did it took the Glock with them.  His wife was working late at her office, and we’ve already corroborated her alibi.  Children, Robert Jr., age six.   Daughter, Amy, age twelve, were asleep upstairs when the oldest heard the shot, locked themselves in the room and dialed 999.”

“Where are the children, now?”  John glances around the sitting room before kneeling in front of the body.  Always thoughtful, my John, doesn’t want any offspring to walk in on him prodding the corpse of their father and become traumatised for life.  Bit not good, that.

He tilts his head, picks up the dead man’s wrist.  It’s well on its way to succumbing to the effects of rigor mortis.  Roughly two hours gone.  Would need to determine the levels of lactic acid build up to determine an exact time.

 

“They’re still up there, mother is making arrangements for a grandparent to take them away from here.  Sweet kids.  Really shaken up.”

“Yes, that tends to happen when you’re father is violently murdered in your home.”  I say.  John clears his throat and glances at me.  Was I being tactless again?

 

A handful of documents at the desk.  Did anyone care to even look here?  Mr. Cooper was quite clearly involved in the extortion of a male client.  Of course more specific documentation would not be left out in the open, but one’s retainer fee does not simply triple in sum overnight.  I’m sure when I locate the safe--

“How are you sure he was asleep?”  John examines Mr. Cooper’s lifeless hand.  Nearly ash coloured, save for the gold band of a wedding ring, and the coagulated blood surrounding the shot right through the center of the palm..

“Well, he was in bed,” Oh, good Christ, Anderson.  “Half three in the morning.”

“Yeah, I get that--” John tries to indicate the exit wound on the hand.  I drop my papers and crowd into John’s space beside the body.  He shifts his heels, makes room for me between the bed and the wall.  The line of his thigh presses against mine.

“Probably had his hand covering his eyes, _asleep_ , when they took the shot.  For god's sake, the man has on his pyjamas, I think it’s safe to assume--”

“Shut up Anderson,”  I say.  Best to just nip it in the bud.  He looks at Lestrade with his typically peevish expression and folds his arms.

 

“The bullet exited through the top of the hand, so his palm would have been facing up,” John indicates the ruined mess of blood and fragmented bone where intact metacarpals use to be.  “Not that it’s impossible, or unheard of, but a bit of an awkward position to sleep in.  Suppose it doesn’t quite matter in the scheme of things.”

“Defensive posturing.  Holding his hand up to block a bullet.  Meaning he would have seen the murderer.  Good work John.”   But no, not exactly helpful.  He’s dead.  Can’t exactly hand his statement over to a sketch artist.  The corner of John’s mouth lifts a little, a flush creeping underneath his collar. (God.  Not at a crime scene.)

“Fancy yourself a forensic technician, now? ”  Anderson pouts from the corner.  I turn to reply, as I am still utterly unsure on how he managed to complete a university curriculum without his brain spontaneously combusting with the effort.  He isn’t addressing me though.  Typically his vitriol is exclusively devoted in my direction.  But he isn’t talking to me this time, he’s looking at John.  

Bit unwise.  John has a temper.  I do, as well, but mine usually manifests itself immediately.  John’s occasional cantankerousness lies dormant underneath layers of stoicism and cuddly jumpers.  People only see what they want to see.  Wonderfully complex, disarmingly lovely John.  He goes on as if he hasn’t heard the first word out of Anderson.  Shame.  Would have loved to witness John get into a scrap.

 

“Saw this sort of wound all the time in Afghanistan.  Mostly women and children, soldiers, being executed.  Body’s instinctive reaction when someone has a gun to your head.”  John smiles lackadaisically.  

Anderson clears his throat and exits into the hallway.

“He was also blackmailing a client.  We need to find his safe, likely he was keeping further evidence there.”  I duck underneath the bed to look for it.  Very likely it’s a free standing model, easily transportable, under the bed is a common space for such items.  

“How do you know he’s involved in extortion?” Lestrade’s face appears under the line of the bed frame.  (Safe isn’t there, need to check upstairs in the study.)

“I doubt his fee rocketed from twenty-five thousand, to seventy-five thousand quid in the span of twenty four hours for ‘miscellaneous costs.’  It’s all presented on those private documents over on the desk no one bothered to look at.  Also receipts for sudden purchases of exorbitant items, beyond even the budget for a man of his wealth class.  You and John check downstairs for a safe.”  I turn and walk out of the bedroom, leaving John and Lestrade to their own devices.  I climb the staircase and find the study.  Several officers still mill about, I can hear the wife (now widow) in the hallway speaking on the phone.  She’s crying, nearly hysterical with it. (Can question her later.)

 

The study is unremarkable, smells like stale cigars.  Two week old stain from Laphroaig single malt whiskey on the arm of an upholstered chair.  Water marks covering the corner of the desk:  Often drinking to excess.  Neglected the use of a coaster after the third drink. Files categorized alphabetically.  

Ah, yes, terribly unoriginal.  Small safe in the bottom drawer of the desk underneath a ream of printing paper.  Barksa combination compact safe,  requires 4 digit sequence to access.  More complicated than letter based combinations.

 

Two children.  Six and twelve.  (No pictures of his wife and children.  Why is that?) One personal picture on his bookshelf, I pick it up.

Dull.  Mr. Cooper holding a Cairn terrier.  Obviously a bit of a egoist.  His various diplomas and awards are hung on the walls.  Everything is situated in glorification of his accolades.  Yet there’s no sign of his family at all, not even a baby picture hidden in the binding of his day planner.  

 

“Sir, you don’t look like a police man.”  

 

I look down at small fingers clenched to the sleeve of my coat.  A mess of ginger hair peeking over the top of the desk.

 

How the hell--

I thought they had an officer watching the children, what is one doing wandering about?  Is Scotland Yard’s finest so dismally inept they can’t watch a six year old little boy?  

“Where’s your guardian?”  Best to return the child from whence it came.  

“I told her I was going to the loo.”  The boy explains, shuffling his feet.

Fantastic.  

“That’s papa’s safe.”  He brushes the top of it with his tiny fingers, slots a thumbnail along the crevices where lid meets the hold.

“Yes.”  And then, “Do you know the combination?”

He looks confused.  Long shot, anyway.  

 

“Are you going to take us to jail?”  

What was Mr. Cooper’s birthdate?  He seems the type to use it as his safety combination.  I begin rifling through his day planner.  “Am I what?”

“Going to take me and Amy to jail?”  he specifies.

“Perhaps.  If you can’t remain quiet while I try to break into your father’s safe, then possibly so, yes.  Believe me, you won’t like it.  Full of idiots.”

The child laughs.  “You’re funny.”

“Don’t be absurd.”  

He laughs again.  Must be in shock.  Or simply too young to process the death of his father, his body going stiff and cold just below our feet.  Children can have remarkable coping mechanisms in the face of grief, and they’re typically more tolerable than the lot of adults any given day.  A shame society drills pointless material into their minds.  Most youths are naturally perceptive until the distraction of worthless information becomes too great.  The concept of the “big picture” always taking precedence over small details.

There’s a loud noise from downstairs, someone (likely Anderson) knocking over a vase, it crashes against the split brick that tiles most of the downstairs.  The boy startles, jumping at the sound, he grabs my fingers.  Won’t let go.  Should bring him to his sister.  John ought to have come upstairs, he’d have the child tucked up with a teddy and a cup of hot milk by now.

I sigh, bend down to try and extract the hand from mine, but his eyes are fearful, wide and green, too big for his small face.  

“Robert?”  Or does he go by Junior.  “All right?”  I try tugging my hand softly away from his.  He resists, I look down to where he grips my index, middle, and ring finger.  His own fingernails gnawed to the quick.  Nervous habit.

Purpling marks peek out from underneath the sleeve of his jimjams.  

Oh.

I set my right hand against his sleeve, “Can I see?”

“I fell on the play yard at nursery school.”  He says it without inflection, a rehearsed phrase.

“I know, it’s fine.  I just want to check.”

The boy nods his head.  I purse my lips, drag his sleeve up to elbow.  Extensive bruising on his upper forearm, extending onto his bicep.  A red and purple ring all around, then individual marks left by fingertips.  Grabbed roughly, and yanked about.

“Do you have any more?”

He lifts his shirt a little.  His ribs a mess of black and blue and crimson and violet, wrapping around his back.  Some older bruises already are turning green and fading.  

_Are you going to arrest us?_

I’ve gotten this wrong.

 

“ _Robby_!  Come here, now!”  

 

My head jerks up as the boy flees my grip, runs and hides behind (what I assume is) his sister. She pulls her arms backward, shielding him from me.  Her cotton nightdress hangs about her bare ankles.  She has soot between her toes, long blond hair still damp at the roots.

 

I’ve gotten it very wrong, indeed.

 

“Stay away from him.”  She warns, voice shaking, tearful but fierce.  “Just leave him alone.”

“Where did you hide the gun?”  I ask, watching her mouth fall open then click shut.  

 

“You’re very clever.  Knew where he kept his gun.  Knew to wash the gunpowder from your hands.  Burned your clothes in the fireplace.  Took a shower and washed off the blood.”  Her lips quiver, tears spill down her cheeks, but she stands defiant of it all.  Covering her brother like safety blanket.  “Where did you leave the gun?”

 

“Father was hurting him,” She whispers across the room, hoarse and terrified, “He came in our room, pulled out, took him to--”  She shakes her head, face contorting painfully, “He had him in his bed.  He wouldn’t stop.  I tried..  I only wanted to scare him.  He wouldn’t stop.” She repeats, shoulders shaking.

 

“I know,” I stand, reach my hand out in some attempt to calm, crane my head to look behind her, “I understand.”

 

“It’s in the safe, the one you have.  Four-Six-Two-Four.”  She sniffs, takes a deep breath, “It’s just a nonsense number.  I keyed in combinations until I got it right.  Took hours.”  

“Remarkable.”  It is.  I would have grown impatient and likely have attempted to jackhammer the thing open.  Perhaps thrown it off a tall building in hopes of cracking the seams.  Effective, but not exactly artful.

I turn about, key in the number, open the compartment.  The glock on top, pictures of a man (likely the individual he was blackmailing) engaged in lewd acts with what looks disturbingly like underage males, underneath.

 

“I don’t care what you do with me,” She says, her voice clearer now, “It doesn’t matter anymore.  But please, sir, make sure Robby doesn’t go to a home.  He isn’t like me.  He won’t know what to do, if someone..”  She doesn’t finish the sentence.  I understand regardless.  A child conditioned into silence, an easy target.

 

“I’m sure it won’t be necessary, you still have your mother.”  As useless as she is, there is no possible way for her to not have noticed the abuse.

The girl laughs, an anguished sound, completely without mirth, “Sir, Mummy only cares about shagging her boss.  She’s usually gone for weeks at a time.  It’s only been me since Robby was a toddler.”

I turn this over in my mind.  We had nannies, but if I wasn’t busy scaring them off, then father was busy fucking them.

(Mycroft pouring milk in my cereal bowls in the mornings, ironing my uniform trousers for primary school, tying a rope swing in the branches of the elm tree, suppers consisting of beans and toast.)

 

I clamp down on my memories, “I see.”  I don’t know what else to say.  “You’ll need to take your brother and go back into your room.”

She nods, reaches down to hold the boy’s hand. “What’s going to happen to me?”  

 

It’s likely she won’t receive any sort of draconian punishment, or a juvenile sentence.  Mandated counseling, extremely likely.  Self-defense isn’t a far stretch at all, but I am not going to make promises that might even have the scant chance of falling through.

“You’ll be questioned.  Be honest.  Try not to panic.”  It’s the wrong thing to say, but there isn’t anything better. She nods, hadn’t been expecting comfort to begin with, probably had already assumed this is how her life would evolve all along.  

She turns to leave, pauses outside the doorway and looks up, stricken all over again, “ _Oh_ , I..”  and she runs down the hall, brother in tow.  I hear the distant sound of a door opening then latching itself shut.  John steps out from along the wall of the hallway, stands in the doorway.  We stare at each other for a few long moments.  The snap of a camera echoes up the staircase, they’re photographing the scene downstairs.

 

“I heard most of that,” John says quietly, “Wish I hadn’t.  Christ.”  He gives a devastated look in the direction of the children had gone.  “She’ll be fine, won’t she?  I mean..  They won’t punish her for that.”  

I don’t answer, only stare into the contents of the small safe in my hands.

“Sherlock?  You ‘kay?”

I want to go home.  I don’t want to be here.

 

“Hey,” John comes into the room, slides the safe out of my hands and into his, “We’ll go straight there after we talk to Lestrade, yeah?”  He tilts his head, looks up to meet my eyes.

I hadn’t known I’d said it out loud.  

John takes me by the elbow, leads me out of the room and to the stairs where I shrug out of his grip.  

 

Lestrade is talking on his mobile and disconnects the call when we reach the landing.  Sally Donovan stands tapping her foot alongside him, flipping through the documents I’d previously examined.  Lestrade looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to explode into deductions and explanations.  I take a breath and nothing comes out.  John nudges me out of the way and hands the safe over to Lestrade.

 

“So, whoever it was knew the combination to his safe, and--” Lestrade says, cocks his head and grimaces when he sees the pictures, “Oh.”

 

“Er--” John begins, giving me time to jump in and explain.  It seems I have nothing to offer.  I’ve involved myself in hundreds of domestic cases, even ones comparable to this one.  I don’t know why this one is any different than another.  

I still can’t talk.

 

“Yeah, you’ll be wanting to arrest the man in the pictures, but he wasn’t the killer.”

Lestrade looks over to me, waiting, “He’s not?”

“No,” John continues, “Mr. Cooper was abusing his son-- We, Sherlock, I mean, he saw the bruises, someone needs to give the boy a proper examination.  I can do a quick check, but he’s going to need x-rays and-- look, that can be sorted later.  The boy was being beaten, possibly assaulted--” John swallows, casts his eyes over to me,”...sexually.  His sister was trying to protect him.  She wanted to scare Mr. Cooper off of him with the gun and fired.  It was an accident.  Self-defense, or defense of another, whatever you call it, it wasn’t malicious.”

Lestrade blinks, first at John, then at me.  “God,” he looks over at Donovan who folds her arms and gives a pitying look upward.  “Yeah, alright.  We’ll talk to the mother, get some child services advocates over here before we speak with the kids.”  He clears his throat.  “So what about these here,” he points to the pictures Mr. Cooper was using as blackmail, “Get anything off of em’?”

 

John looks over to me, having reached the extent of his available information.  

“What’s wrong with freak?”  Donovan narrows her eyes at me.  “Disappointed you don’t have a serial killer or a--”

“Fuck _off_ , Sally!” John interrupts her, arms thrown into the air only to fall to his side in exasperation, “ _God_ , leave him alone.   No, no, sorry, I just mean shut up.  Please.”

 

Everyone stares at John, shocked.  He notices, shifts awkwardly on his feet.

 

Something inside me is contracting, heating up.  Makes my chest hurt in a way that’s almost familiar.    It feels like anger, but different.  Anxiety?  I feel confused, light headed, skin feels too tight.

Oh, it is.  Anxiety.  I’m having an anxiety attack?  Why?

It would be fascinating, perhaps, if I didn’t feel like child needing to run and hide under the bed.

 

“Right, well.  Look, if you can’t find the bastard in the pictures, text us.  We’re off.  Make sure someone takes well enough care of those kids.”  John looks toward me again, I turn on my heels and begin making my way outside, John following behind.

 

The cab ride back to Baker Street is silent.  My head pressed against the glass, clenching my fists to keep from shaking.  I don’t know why my hands want to tremble.  John doesn’t look at me much, the sun is nearly fully risen, flooding the cab with daybreak orange.  We stop in front of our flat, I evacuate the vehicle, leave John to pay, let myself inside.

 

Mrs. Hudson in her curlers, “Morning dear,  thought I heard you two pop out in the middle of the night.  Should I bring up--”

I ignore her.  Vaguely hear John making apologies for me.  I take the stairs two at a time until I’m through our door and shed my coat in the middle of the sitting room.  

“Sherlock--”  John’s here.  Somewhere behind me.

I feel disgusting.  I feel _disgusting_.  (Sprint to the shower.)

 

I turn on the showerhead, it’s cold, I don’t care.  Climb in anyways, sit underneath the spray, don’t bother to close the curtain.

Oh.  I forgot to take off my trousers.  And shoes.  And shirt.  I’ll just have to keep them on.  I don’t want to move, if I move something terrible might happen.

 

“Sherlock, what the hell--”  

 

When did John start walking in on me in the shower?

 

“You left the door open.” (Ah.)  “You’re still dressed.”

I’m not even staring at him.  Well, just his shoes, because they’re in the way. I’m trying to count the grout lines between the tile squares, and it seems I’m unable.  

 

John throws a towel down in front of the tub, moves it about with his foot to mop up the water and kneels in front of me.  

 

“What’s wrong?”  He slips his hands over the side of the tub, touches my hands clasped around my knees.  His cuffs grow sodden with water, he strokes a thumb over the top of my wrist.

“The water is freezing.  You’re shaking.”  (Am I?)  

“What can I do?”  John, always wanting to fix.  

 

I don’t know.  I don’t know, John.  I shake my head, I can’t look at him.

He stands up, must be leaving.  Probably thinks I am in the middle of some bizarre experiment he, once again, is not privy to.

 

He reaches for the shower knobs, adjusts the temperature, takes off his shoes and climbs in after me.  

 

“Good thing you’re sitting down.  Much easier this way.  Less chance of us falling to our death in this slippery bastard.”

I want to laugh.  He wants to make me laugh.  I’m frightening him, I can hear it in his voice.  

 

I hug my arms tighter around my knees, only able to tremble and breathe.  Think about ribs turned black and blue, my father rubbing circles into me while I tried not think about how he was masturbating onto my bed and touching me.  

 

An old garden shed, ragged splinters working their way underneath my skin.  He pressed me against it, once.  Just held me there, considering.  Sweat from summer heat pushing out of my glands, the smell of a nervous animal: Me.  An ant stung the arch of my foot.  Father brushing his hand down my ribs.  I didn’t know what it meant at the time.  But it made my blood buzz in my veins.  Petrichor and the spectrum of evaporating rain.

 

I never killed him.  I doubt I would have had the will, my rare silences being unique and impenetrable.  

In the end, we all find our purchase on the ground, we go down into it, with no words left on our lips at all. Shed our memories like a winter coat grown too warm.  I think there will be a hole around my rot, I go off to feed the emptiest parts of the earth. Parts that already are long since blackened by need.  

 

Feet shifting against the slick porcelain of the tub.

John kneeling alongside me, tips his forehead against my shoulder then looks back up, “Oh God, Sherlock,” he sets his fingers under my eyes, wipes gently, smoothes the hair away.  “Please don’t cry.”  His voice is quiet and sincere, it only makes the burning in my eyes and chest worse.  

 

I’m crying?  

 

“It’s okay.”

 

But it isn’t.  I’m ashamed.  Mycroft said no, never in front of anyone.

 

He fits himself behind me, slipping his arms around my waist.  I’m shaking and shaking, and my eyes are burning.  He rests his head on my shoulder, compresses me against his chest, wet and warm all over.  

 

“What happened to you,” he whispers, “What happened?”

 

Water pelts against our bodies.  John stays wrapped around me for what feels like ages.  The bathroom mists with the shower’s humidity.  

 

Eventually the burning stops, and I just feel hollow.  Everything having overflown and disappeared down the drain, if it were that simple.

 

My elbows down are going numb from having been clasped so tightly, I stretch out my fingers, roll my wrists.  John begins disentangling himself from around me, reaches behind and shuts off the water.

 

“Let’s get you out of here, c’mon,”  John climbs out from the tub, takes my hand and pulls me up, steadies me at the shoulder when I begin to waver.  “Go put on something dry, and I’ll clean this up.”  He hands me a towel, stares at me intently until I wander out and into my bedroom.

 

It’s cold in here, but it could just be because I’m soaking wet and dripping onto the floor.   I undo my buttons, peel myself out of my shirt, toss it off into a corner.  Same with my trousers and pants, everything goes into a soaking heap between the armoire and the jar of dirt samples stacked three high.  I use the the towel John gave me and scrub it through my hair, giving a perfunctory pat down everywhere else.  There’s only one pair of clean pyjamas, and on they go.

 

John knocks on my door, “You decent?”

As if he hasn’t seen me in more precarious states of undress.  “Yes.”

 

He walks in, water falling from his sleeves and jeans, silver-blonde hair dark and slick with water.  The way it looks when John forgets his coat and it begins misting rain on his way back from the Tesco's.  He’ll walk through the door with paper bags tucked under his arms, and my heart leaps into my throat from wanting to touch.

 

“I’m going to get changed, be back in a minute.”  He turns to let himself out, pauses then faces me again, “I mean, not if you don’t want me to.  Come back, I mean.”  He furrows his brow at his own floundering.  “Just get in the bed, you need to sleep, and I’ll bring you a cuppa.”

I only nod my head, I don’t care about the cuppa.  But I’ll have it if it means John coming back.

 

I sit on the edge of the bed for several minutes.  Exhausted.  I’m exhausted.  I can barely even think, the nothingness of it is unbearable, it sets my teeth on edge.  I can hear John moving about in the sitting room now, speaking quietly to Mrs. Hudson.  They’re talking about me, I can make out my name, but not much else.   Then again, their favorite subject is a meta on my eccentricities.  A conversation tinged with simultaneous frustration and fondness.

 

John’s coming back now, nudges open my door with a foot.  

“Mrs. Hudson made chamomile with honey for you.”  He hands off the cup to me, I take a drink.  Burns the back of my throat.  Feels nice.  John hates chamomile, but is too polite to tell Mrs. Hudson.  He grimaces into his mug and sets it on my nightstand.  

“I don’t know how you stand this stuff,” he folds his arms and nods toward me, “I’d rather drink petrol.”

“Chamomile can stimulate uterine contractions.”  I announce.

“Well, let me know if you’re feeling crampy and I’ll bring out the stirrups and a bucket of hot water.”

“You haven’t any stirrups.”  He doesn’t.  I would have found them by now.

“And you don’t have a uterus so I think we’ll be alright.”

 

John plucks absently at a pillowcase, “Yeah.  So you ought to getting some rest.  I’ll just go watch telly, and if you need me--”

“Stay,” with me, I mean, “Here.”  I nod toward the bed,  “I would like that.”  Please.

John looks back to the door, purses his lips, faces me again, “If you want me to, I don’t mind.  Um.  Not at all.”  

 

I pull the linens down and climb into the right side of the bed, John on the left, a foot and a half of space between us.  It feels like a solid line, as if I could set my fingers to it and meet resistance.

 

“Keep those cold feet to yourself though, I have serious doubts that blood even circulates to your toes.”  But he settles onto a pillow anyway.  Lies on his back, wriggles his shoulders, then turns on his side to face me.  “You going to sleep, then?” John asks after awhile.

 

“I can’t.”

He frowns, “You don’t want to?”

“I can’t.”  

He licks his lips, regards me.  We lie staring at one another.

 

“I’ve not ever done this before.”

“Done what?”  He asks.

“Been in bed with another person.  Aside from Mycroft, perhaps, when I was a toddler.”

“Not even sleeping over at your best mate’s house?”  

John.  You know, you must know.  “There hasn’t been one.”

“Oh.  That’s..”  But he never completes the thought, instead smiles brightly and asks, “Want to play a game?”

“Cluedo.”  

John gives an abrupt snort, “God, no.  Never again.  Besides, you drove a steak knife through it, remember?”

Ah, yes.  We could put tape over it.

 

“It’s like truth or dare.  Without the daring.  I tell you a secret, then you tell me a secret.  You can ask one question about the secret you’ve been told.”

“John, that isn’t even subtle.”  Although, tempting.  I can’t imagine many secrets of any importance of John’s that I haven’t sorted already.  He only laughs lightly and smiles at me.  

“Look, you don’t have to answer or say anything you don’t want to.  It can be small or big, or stupid or weird.”

I pause.  Consider.  “Yes.  You first.”

 

John takes a deep breath, looks up at the ceiling, then very seriously, “I nicked Harry’s Spice Girls c.d.”  

What.

“I was a fully grown adult male, and I nicked my sister’s Spice Girls album.  I still feel really bad about it.”  He exhales in a rush.

“Why did you…” John.  “Why would you nick a Spice Girls album?”  I don’t understand.

“Why do you even know who the Spice Girls are?  Big fan, are you?”  He raises an eyebrow.  We both break into laughter, it shakes the bed, fills my lungs, and releases itself.  It’s like a flood of warmth and relief, tension unfurling from within me.  

 

Still, I don’t deem it necessary to answer that question so I sort about for my own secret.

 

“When I was seven I made my own itching powder out of crushed maple seeds and rose hips.  I had just wanted to see if it actually worked.  I sprinkled it over Mycroft’s choir robe before sunday service.  He ruined _Tantum Ergo_ with his scratching.”  I did feel remorseful for a moment.  He took my mortar and pestle and that was revenge enough.

“Were you in choir, as well?”  John asks.  

I scoff, “Hardly, I could scarcely abide church as it was.  Mycroft only did it to please mother.”

“I bet you’d be a brilliant singer, with your voice.”  He says conversationally.

What does that mean?  Is he implying that he likes the sound of my voice?  Or that I would be a successful vocalist because I have a voice at all.

 

“My turn now,” he says, not explaining further.  He chews his bottom lip for a long second, shifts about.  Closer now, by an entire inch.

 

“My first girlfriend-- well-- My first everything.  I found her in bed with Harry.  Rugby practice had been canceled because our coach caught ‘flu, so I went home.  Obviously they weren’t expecting me because I found Clarissa Mayfield in a very compromising position in Harry’s bed. Broke up with Clarissa, and wouldn’t speak to Harry for weeks.  Thank Christ that Harry was under the sheets, else I might never have recovered.”  He giggles lightly, shakes his head as if to sling out the budding mental image.

“How old were you?”  I ask.  One question per secret.  Reach over and take a sip of Mrs. Hudson’s tea.

“Sixteen.  Young enough to believe that the best medicine for a break up is a re-bound shag with Clarissa’s best friend, David.  Which was completely awful, and extremely confusing.”

I almost choke on the tea, it nearly comes out of my nostrils.

“You aren’t--” I try, only to be cut off.

“No, Sherlock.  You already used up your question.”  John gives me a resolved look, the one that says it’s fruitless to attempt further.  I narrow my eyes.  Wanting quite badly, and with a personal vendetta, to know the intricacies of John’s sexual psychology.

I hate rules.  

John lies there watching me, quiet and waiting.  Not pressuring me at all.  Not making fun.  Content to extend the silence between us.

 

“I was--” I clear my throat, run my tongue against the roof of my mouth, “There’s only been one person.  Victor.  I was twenty-one.”  Why is this hard?  Why can truth be so easy from one fact to another, but _this_ , this is different.  “It wasn’t a steady relationship, nor was it a particularly healthy one.”  I can feel John go tense, “He gave me cocaine when I became… unsure.  It became a pattern.”

John’s face crumples in some realization, then shifts swiftly into an expression of anger.  Not at me.  I know the difference.  He sets his jaw, the indignant line of it.  God, he’s lovely when he’s like that.

 

“It only lasted two months and he was offered a position at a biotechnology company in America.  I haven’t spoken to or seen him in years.  I never tried again.”  

Not that I wanted to.  Not really.  Only when it was so quiet I couldn’t bear it any longer.  The seldom moments that I craved hands on my skin over a needle in my vein.  And then, John.

 

“That’s not how it works, you know.  Relationships.  It’s not about one person rearranging the other to suit their needs..  You can love someone and not have to control or manipulate them.  Not like that.  I would never--”  John sighs, turns his nose into the pillow, then faces me again.  “Did he hurt you?  Did you love him?”

 

“That’s two questions, but alright,”  If I give an allowance now, he’ll give one later.  A worthwhile investment.  “I was aware I was being manipulated, but I wanted--”  I don’t know, “I wanted.”  I finish simply.  “Victor was not capable of reciprocating.  He wasn’t reciprocal in any context, come to think.”

“How the _hell_ is that possible?”  John interrupts, distinctly looking at my mouth, down the line of my body though it’s underneath the sheets.  “I’m sorry, go on.”

 

That is…  Incredibly flattering.

 

“He struck me once.  He was a bit rough, all around.  Then again I’m not exactly a docile personality to contend with, so there was usually some sort of provocation involved.”

“Don’t do that.  Don’t make excuses.”  John brushes a curl from my forehead, a quick flick of his finger.  He has it tucked up beneath the pillow before I’ve even registered the lingering warmth.

 

“We were in the Farah province,”  John closes his eyes, swallows, “It started out as a simple humanitarian effort, we were in a village that had seen..  a lot of damage.  Um.”  He opens his eyes, but they’re distant and unfocused.  Instead of seeing me in front of him, there’s only sand and convoys.  Cracked stones and the blood washing over them.  

 

“I was there treating civilians, there had been some attacks earlier in the week.  We set up a sterile area on the second story of an old building, I don’t know what it was used for before it closed up.  People qued up outside.  Simple procedures mostly, stitches, wound management, burn treatments.  Did a lot of check ups on the kids from the village.  Saw a lot of old injuries, not healed up proper, things that could have prevented if...  Anyway,”  licks his lips, I try moving closer.  He’s never told me about the day he was shot.  Even I know better than to force it out of him.

 

“They’d set up a perimeter of course, we had a security detail, taken all the standard precautions.  But you can’t predict a suicide bomber.  I was treating a little boy, his mum of course couldn’t speak to me.  She tugged up his trouser leg and he had some nasty burns.  She’d tried to take care of them, but burns get infected so easily.  I was cleaning it out when the bomb went off.”  His eyes clench shut.  I touch the skin on his wrist and he looks back at me.

 

“A school, Sherlock, just kids trying to have a normal life.  One second you’re learning maths, and the next you’re dead?”  He says it like it’s a question.  I shake my head, I don’t have an answer for the twisted logic of some men.

 

“It was only a couple buildings away from ours.  The windows all blew out at the clinic, everyone was shouting, screaming.  The boy had fallen off the examination block, his mother had been knocked clear out when a bit of the ceiling fell on her.  I dragged her over to where we were, put them behind a table.  A few soldiers were cut up from the glass.  Banks, the other surgeon in our squad was tending to some of them.  I worked on the kid’s mum. That’s when the bullets started flying.  Seems a few sympathisers were harboring Taliban insurgents, Christ, it seemed like hundreds.  I know it couldn’t have been, but..  It was an ambush.”

He takes his hand out from underneath the pillow, slides it until my fingers rest flat against his palm.  I dip my finger into the long line that runs through the middle, trace it with a fingernail.

“Dodgerson, one of the Privates assigned to the detail, he came running upstairs, said the building was on fire down there.  Had already grown too large to contain and we needed to evacuate.  Said he’d get as many people as he could through the emergency exit before it caught, too.  He was still talking when he caught a bullet in the neck.  Dead, just like that.  I knew then, there was a sniper somewhere out there.  I could hear soldiers shouting outside, bullets going off.  I was smelling the fire at that point.  We had to do something, it was either risk the sniper bullet or burn to death.”

 

“You had to make a run for it.”  I surmise.  

 

“I started shouting at the security detail, told them to stay low to the ground.  Sent civilians over, crawling across the concrete.  Had the boy and his Mum behind me, she was still unconscious.  I tried to get the kid to go with one group, but he wouldn’t move.  Just held onto his mum behind the metal table.  I didn’t have time to argue with him, there were still others.  We had gotten two groups out already, the emergency exit led to an alleyway where they could get a good bit of distance from the fire.  And then the soldiers leading out the civilians stopped coming back.  The fire had closed off the exit, so there was no way to make it back to us.  It was only me, my two patients, the other surgeon, my nurse Murray, and Private Mcdaniel.  The only exit left was the window.  There was a canvas canopy between the second story and the ground, so there was something to break the fall.  But we’d be right out in the open, would have to fall and run for cover, and there was that sniper out there, other insurgents.”

John closes his fingers in a loose hold over mine.

“I told the other surgeon to get out first, he was probably needed in the field, and I would get the boy and his mother.  He got out alright, nasty ankle sprain, I found out later, but his boots kept it supported so he could run.  Murray made it out, made it to cover.  I thought the sniper might have relocated.”

 

“McDaniel couldn’t have been older than twenty, couldn’t have been.  I didn’t know him well, was really very quiet.  Nice. He said he’d get the boy down, the mother was beginning to come around, disoriented and agitated with it.  Smoke was everywhere.  He held onto the boy while they jumped, made sure he landed on his back so that the kid wouldn’t get hurt.  I didn’t realize he’d taken one in the gut, went through a weak point in the kevlar.  He still managed to roll so that the boy was shielded with his body, somehow got down from the canopy and into the alleyway where he died.  I didn’t know until later, Bill tried working on him but he bled out.”

“I still needed to move, still had to get the woman out.  She was refusing to leave, I couldn’t understand her.  She was speaking Pashto, we had mostly spent time in Dari speaking regions.  I tried to calm her down, but she thought we’d killed her boy.  Couldn’t remember watching him make the jump.  I apologised to her, then had to physically lift her up and toss her out of the window, I went right behind so I could cover her.  Killed a man who was running toward us with a torch and a rifle.  She was in shock.  Collapsed right there in the dirt, her head still a bloody awful mess.  Crying and..  I tried dragging her.  Had her around the waist pulling her along.  I don’t remember so much after that.”

 

His hand tightens around mine.  “Gunfire was everywhere, fucking burning smoke from the building.   I was in the open, a Lance Corporal tried to make a run to help but was beaten back.”  

 

A deep, shaking breath,  “Then I was shot.  I didn’t feel it at first, was so concentrated on the woman, took my brain a couple seconds to catch up.  It hit me all of a sudden, felt like my lungs and shoulder and arm were exploding.  For a second I thought we were literally being blown up by another bomb what with all the smoke and fire.  I remember thinking it was a bit rubbish,” He laughs, “Mum had died while I was still in uni, it was only Harry left.  I didn’t want her seeing me all blown up into smithereens.   Not that they’d ever let a family member see that, but I was nearly passed out and the blood loss was making me wonky in the head.”  

 

“I was in and out of it for a long time.  Would pass out and when I came around Murray had ripped open my vest and had his fingers in me looking for the bullet.  God, now that was awful.  Worse than the shot, itself.  Apparently he’d seen me go down and made a dash to drag me to cover.  Saved my life.”

 

I take my hand from his, brush my fingers over the cotton shirt, feeling the texture of the scar underneath.  The evidence of trauma, a physical scar as proof that it happened at all.

 

“What happened to the boy and his mother?”  I ask.

 

John frowns, covers my hand again, pulls it away from his shoulder to set my palm against his cheek.  His eyes drift shut.  “I don’t know,” he says quietly, “I don’t know.  Nobody knew.”

 

We lie together in silence, the faint noises of traffic drifting through windows into the spaces of our home.  Life going on in spite of the intimate cocoon spinning itself around us both.

 

“That night, when you threw the chair out of the window.  Were you--”

 

“Yes,” He nods, the coarse stubble of his cheek rubbing against my palm, “It was smoke and bullets and Private Dodgerson’s skull shattered into bits on the concrete..  and then it was damp and broken glass and you.”

 

John’s eyes come open again, “I haven’t ever told anyone.”

“I know.”  I could tell by your voice.

“Can I kiss you?” He says in a rush, “No, I’m sorry, I mean--”  He squeezes his eyes shut, winces, I can feel my blood rising into my cheeks,  “I know you said--”

 

But it doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter what I said.   I don’t care, it’s excruciating to be so close, to be this close, and not touch.  I don’t care that there are consequences.  I cover John with my body, he rolls until I’m laid flat against him.  I span his body like a shield and I stay there.  Press my mouth, hard, against his, and _yes,_  perfect.  I can hear John’s voice disappear behind the crush of our lips when he makes a frantic sound.  We’re grabbing at each other, I can’t get close enough, I can’t get _close enough_.  I have a hand under his shirt, scraping at his chest like I am going to literally crawl inside of it if I can manage to break through.

 

John’s fingers in my hair, his frenetic petting against my ribs, and he kisses me until our teeth click.  He doesn’t seem to mind my lack of finesse, he seems completely content to let me lick against his tongue, our noses grazing as he tilts his chin from one angle to another.  Right or left, I don’t care, I like them all as long as I have John nipping at my bottom lip.  He pulls his knees up, I situate myself between the bracket, roll my hips, feel the heat and hardness between us.  Friction is _brilliant._  John agrees because he says, “Oh my _God_ , that’s brilliant.”  

 

Extremely encouraging.  One hand supporting my weight, the fingertips of the other pushing underneath the line of his pyjama pants.  I rub back and forth,  John is busy trying to tug up my shirt, but that would mean moving my hand from where it’s underneath his pants, and I’d really rather not.  

 

“We shouldn't be doing this,”  the words are breathless and completely unconvinced.  “Not if you’re not sure, not if you don’t--”

 

No, John, shut up.  Don’t make me think.  

I shove the rest of the way inside his pants and run my open palm along his cock.  He arches into the contact and I wrap my fingers around him, stroking and rubbing my thumb along the fraenulum.

 

“ _Jesus_ , ah, ah--” and I want him to make that noise again, half voice, half breath.  “Stop, you have to--” I roll my hips against him again, press my mouth against his, he kisses me back, hips moving in time with my strokes.  But then he’s shaking his head, grabbing my wrist.  

 

“Please, I want this, you, but no, _Sherlock_ , wait,”  He catches both of my wrists, plants a kiss on the palm of the hand still scarred from having been sliced open on his window.  I struggle against the hold, and struggling turns into thrashing and thrashing turns into John rolling until he’s on top of me with my wrists pinned above my head.  His solid weight holding me against the mattress, and it should feel constricting, I should resent it.  But I feel safe, and it’s somehow more terrifying, the conundrum makes me dizzy trying to pick through it.  Very reminiscent of the first time we did this.  

 

“You kissed _me_!”  I accuse.  Not really, not technically, but he _asked_ and why won’t he just..just..

“Yes, I know!  It isn’t that!”  John shakes his head, looks at me with big eyes.  “I don’t want what happened last time to happen again.”

Oh, honestly, “Are you _quite_ sure, because if your current state of arousal is not an indication of your inclination to have sex with me, then--”

“I didn’t mean sex, I meant after, afterward!”  He’s nearly shouting, not angry, but exasperated.  Squeezes my wrists all the harder.  Not hurting me, just holding me.  

 

“When you push me out of bed and shut the door in my face, then go months not having really talked about it.  And I have to look at you spread out over the sofa, or bent over the table, or touching your right ear, and I want you.  Or when you’re experimenting on bloody rotten prawns, getting into week long strops, and I pick up after you like a child, and I want you.  And I can’t _say_ anything!  I can’t tell you that when you’re blowing up goat’s brains in our microwave, or falling asleep against my leg watching telly on the floor, that I still _want_ you!  It all drives me mad. You idiot!  You wanker, how can _you_ not see that?  How do you not know?   I don’t want to do this, and then go back to… whatever.  So if you’re not sure, if you’re only giving me what you think I want, but you don’t want it too, then tell me outright.  We’re proper adults.  Does that make sense?.  We don’t have to.. I don’t need…  It’s fine, how we were until..  But I--”  John stammers, sighs, “You’re _it_ , for me.”

 

He’s releases my wrists, cups my face, kisses me once, twice and settles softly against my mouth before pulling away, “What do you want from me?  Because everything, you.  I--” He kisses me again.

 

I’m reeling.  It’s the feeling when you drop suddenly, and without expectation, from thin air.  The tethering blue ocean of John’s gaze, my heart, some strange thing that soars and rises above it, only to drop like lead beneath the waves.  Drawn happily, and inexorably downward by the pull of John’s gravity.  This thing that grounds, and keeps me, refuses my diminishment.  Not a trap, but a shelter.  

 

“When you say--” I begin, but words feel thick on my tongue, “The context of what you said, it implies your feelings have progressed past hormonal infatuation.”

 

John pauses to consider, tries to shift himself off of me but I knock him back into place, “Yes.  For quite some time now.”  He says simply, as if the endless intricacies of such feelings warrant no sense of panic.

 

“It isn’t logical.”  And it’s completely unadvisable.  “What you’re feeling is a an unstable chemical reaction.  Or possibly Stockholm syndrome.  It isn’t _logical_ ,”  I repeat.

John sighs, “It isn’t supposed to be.  It isn’t quantum mechanics or a crime scene.  There’s no set equation for this, we make mistakes and do our best.”

“We’ll fight.”  

“Everyone does.  We do, regularly, I might add.  We sort it out, neither of us have left.”

“You will.  People do.”  I imagine. Until now, I’ve never let anyone close enough to find out.    

John looms over me, thumb under my chin, “Barring terrible circumstances or one of us acting completely out of character, I can tell you, I’m not going to leave.  This is already a relationship.  You don’t think you’re capable, but you do this with me every day.  Have done, since the start.  I know what I’m asking for.  I’m not leaving.  Am I lying to you?”

Study John’s face, the familiar lines, clear and readable, affection, and determination.  The absence of anything deceitful, leaving only the plain cut honesty and elemental goodness that is his alone.  

 

“Mad, you’ve gone mad.  I hope you realise that,”  I splay my fingers across the nape of John’s neck, tugging him back down, kissing him again.  Trying to tell him with the press of my lips, words my mouth has never formed.  We kiss until we begin panting into one another, and it’s clear John won’t be stopping this time.

“I’ll muck it all up.  You’ll be angry,”  I don’t make any sense.  I begin tugging up the hem of his nightshirt, rucking up my own in the process.  John’s breath hitches when the skin of his belly touches against mine, and allows the cotton to be tugged over his head.  My shirt comes off as well, he licks into my mouth, closes his eyes and pulls away to rub our noses together.

“It takes time for everyone, Sherlock,” his thumb swipes across my cheek.

“It’s frightening, the risks--,” I whisper against his lips.  I should feel disgustingly defenseless, given over to the chaos of sentimentality.  Allowing buried parts of me to become exposed, my underfed heart, the lingering damage underneath my skin.  

 

Instead, there’s only solace.   The circle of John’s arms stripping away the resentment and coldness and shame, until there’s only the yearning.  The white-hot core of it.

 

“Scares me too,” he breathes, “It’s okay, that’s allowed,” buries his face in my neck, under my jaw, kisses a trail down to my collarbone.  Moves down to brush his lips against my chest, his tongue lapping at my nipple, I shiver, gasp.  Scrape my fingers clumsily through his hair, cataloging the sensation of fine blonde and coarse silver tickling the heel of my palm.

 

John’s fingers running across the ties of my pyjama pants, “Yes?”  He looks up to meet my eyes, pupils blown, cheeks flushed:  Wants consent.  Not only in reference to my body.  But mutual participation in and for all the bits following.  The quiet moments, the awful and black ones, simple, sad, and every nuance in between.  

 

“Yes.” I want it, I shouldn’t have to, shouldn’t need it, shouldn’t matter.

 

But I ache for more.  More of whatever it is of John’s that settles under my skin so profoundly that it defies logic and order, and explanation.  Whatever he is willing to give me. 

 

“No going back, no giving me a front row seat to watch you shut yourself off from the world.  Off from me.  And vice versa.”

He lays out the terms, wants to know if I am completely amenable.  Not frustrated by my apprehension, not wanting to force me out of it with fist across my cheek, or a needle in my veins.  John won’t hold me down and fuck me into submission as a way of negotiation, in which I am the only one forced to compromise.  

 

“Yes,” to all it, “All right,” I’m terrified.  Elated.  

 

“Thank _fuck_ ,” John's voice comes out in a low, swift breath, and he has my pyjamas untied in an instant, pulling them down over my hips.  I struggle to help, arch my back to lift up when John sits back on his knees.  He drags them off and sends them flying over his shoulder, high in the air, they catch on the frame of my periodic table, covering up everything from the alkali metal grouping, through most of the transitional metals.  I tore up the last periodic table in a fit of pique, John went out and bought a new  one, had it framed so I would be deterred in the future.  It isn’t as if I don’t already have the thing memorised, and---

 

_Oh my God, oh god_.  John’s tongue against my cock, licking me from the base to the tip.

Throw my head back onto the pillow, toes curling, fist the bedclothes in my hands.

Lips wrapping around the glans: Hot, wet.  The internal temperature of John’s mouth, 37 degrees celsius, give or take-- Doesn’t matter.

Perfect suction, his tongue increasing friction, down and back up.  The soft lapping noises of his lips and saliva, slick against my skin.

Christ, this must be why everyone is so keen.

 

“ _John_ ,” I buck up, I don’t mean to, I hated it when it was done to me, but John seems to know what he’s doing.  Has his hand charting my hip, feels me twitching and moves in time with me.  Brilliant John, wonderful John.  

 

He pulls off, replaces his mouth with his hand.  A whimper: Mine. Open my eyes, don’t even know at what point I shut them. (Am annoyed)  Wanted to observe.  

 

Positions himself over me again, blows a shaky breath against my chest when our erections slide together.  Slips his hand underneath the small of my back, pulls me close until my hipbones dig into his skin. Cups his hips forward once:  My gasp to John’s groan.  (Need to remove his track pants, immediately.)  Tangle my fingers in the hair above his left ear, drag his mouth up to mine.  The faint sharp taste of myself lingering  on his tongue.  

 

“I’ve not been the recipient of oral sex before.”  (Is it proper bedroom etiquette to relate such matters?)

 

“That’s rubbish,” John manages to pant out, shakes his head and rocks against me.  “You’re gorgeous,” kisses along my shoulder, I writhe against him and he pushes his hand down the length of my arms, sending chills everywhere.  Slots his fingers through mine, brushing against the soft skin at the dips.  “Especially the brain bit right here,” he takes his hand out from underneath me, taps his index finger against the frontal portion of my cranium.   _Thumpthump._  

“Take off your pants,” spread my legs wider, hook my calf around his, drag him against me, eager,  “Fuck me.”  

John’s reaction is instant, and extremely satisfying; fingers tightening through my left hand, a choked off noise, a mix of surprise and relief that makes my lips feel like they’re buzzing when I nuzzle into his neck and begin to nip there.  

“Do you have anything?” he manages to ask between breaths.

_Damn_.

I have absolutely nothing.  There was a tube of lubrication (actually ultrasound gel pinched from St. Bart’s and used as a suspension base for some odd experiments) but it’s long gone.  No condoms, obviously.  Celibate for nearly a decade plus one year, until now.

Everything in the world is unfair in the extreme.

John huffs a breathy laugh, “I’ll need to dash upstairs,” he pushes back off the bed, adjusts the waistband of his pyjama pants, it does nothing to obscure his erection.  I smirk.

“Don’t look so smug,” he says without any venom at all, his eyes raking up my body where I lie sprawled across the bed, “Just, uh.. yeah.  Wait there, don’t move.”  He backs out of the room, eyes everywhere I am.  I roll onto my front, wriggle my hips as if I’m settling.  Mostly, I only want to the hear John’s admiring , “ _Christ_ ,” before disappearing outside the door  

 

Sounds like John is sprinting.  I count each of his footfalls on the steps leading to his room, the soft plod of his feet, then his door shutting.  My heart begins racing in earnest when I hear him on the stairs again, clearing the landing.

 

I was only just a mess in the tub.

Is this how normal people progress?

Crisis in the loo, a game about secrets, another man’s lips against your own.

 

I want it.

 

John nearly trips over himself getting through the door, I watch him over my shoulder.  He catches himself before going face first into the bed.  Looks at me and raises a self-deprecating brow.

 

“Graceful,” I manage not to snort at his fumbling.

“Yeah, perhaps a bit too keen.  I’ll just bring these right back up, shall I?”  He lifts the hand he was using to brace himself, a tube of lubricant and a square piece of foil clutched in his palm.

(Surely he didn’t mean that.)  Best to be certain, I scramble from my spot on the mattress, grab his wrist: Yank.  He does fall this time, right on top of me with a wheeze.  (Wonderful, feeling the solid lines of John’s body over me.  Pinned down, safe.  Claimed.)

“Git,” he says in response to my manhandling, we work together to tug off his pants, a mess of scraping knuckles and knees, kissing each other frantically.

“Insane, didn’t think-- You can can have a hair sample later, Sherlock-- Oh dear--”

 

My effort for follicle extraction noticed, I settle for running my fingers against the grain of John’s hair, touching lightly against the gnarled skin at his shoulder.

 

I get caught up inspecting the whorls of his ear, I nearly have the tip of my little finger worked into the hollow of his external auditory canal when he turns his chin.  Kisses me hard, a hand wrapped around the nape of my neck, “Later, later, I promise.  You can poke and prod me head to toe, it’ll be fantastic.  But I’d _really_ like to get off with you right about now.”  The end of his sentence dissolves into a fit of breathless giggling when I pull my finger away.  (Yes. An otoscope would be much more efficient than my pinky finger.)  Also, “getting off” with John holds a much more satisfying appeal at the moment.

 

I allow him to press me back against the pillows, John rubs his nose into the hair above my ear like a friendly dog.  It tickles, I huff and shiver.  

“Sorry,” John tucks a lock behind my ear, “Always wanted to do that.”

Always?

Kiss him.  Kiss him deep, with my tongue and teeth on his bottom lip, bite and caress.   Take the tube of silicone based lubricant from his hand, leave the condom on my chest, flip the lid.  Cup his fingers in my palm and pour the stuff over them, push his hand away.  He smears his fingers together, strokes the slight concave of my stomach and leans over me.

 

“Tell me if I’m hurting you, it’s been a few years,” John says, looking at me intently.

“Eleven,” more than a few.

“I meant for me.  It’s been fifteen for me.  Like this.  So.”

Like this?  In reference anal penetrative intercourse in general?  Or penetrative intercourse with a male, specifically? Fourteen years, John would have been in university.  What about deployment, did he not take on lovers in Afghanistan?  The PTSD already set in enough that everyone was categorized as a potential casualty?

 

I’m struggling to deduce what I can in my head when I feel John’s finger slips tentatively between my legs, massaging in circles along the perineum, slipping up to rub against more intimate areas.  One finger, smooth and gentle.  Slowly working in and out, giving time for adjustment, I immediately begin panting hot air against John’s shoulder.

John has his forehead tipped into my chest, looking down to where his fingers work me.  

I’m given over to the sensation of it, “More John,” or he’ll be at it forever, “Hurry!”

“Shush, anyone ever told you that you’re really quite bossy,” he kisses over my heart, finally introduces another finger, the burn is there, but it isn’t overwhelming.  Not rough for the sake of having me cringe underneath him; I didn’t know it could be any other way.

I’m extremely inclined to cooperate with the stretch, bare my hips down into it.  John’s finger twitches gently inside of me, and my breath evacuates in one loud moan.  Or a gasp?  Yelp?  (Mrs. Hudson probably out to do the shopping.  Good.)  The wonders of prostate stimulation.  

“ _Fuck_ ,” John bites out the curse against my skin, “Sensitive, God.  You’re going to kill me,” begins moving his fingers faster, nudges the bundle of nerves and I gasp, my entire body keening into John’s touch.  Pushing down at one of John’s shoulders so that he’ll finally just get in, my other hand  grasping at his forearm between our bodies and feeling every muscle coil and strain as he works me open.

Gentle, but demanding, eager and restrained:  The constant balancing act of John Watson.  Every extreme tempered by his constant conscientiousness.  

 

He sits up between my legs, fingers in and out, scissoring.  He tears open the condom foil with his teeth, distractedly, stilling his hand for one moment while he bites his bottom lip and rolls the bit of latex over himself, smears more lubricant over it.  

“Roll onto your front,” he tells me.

“No.”  I’ll stay like this, thank you.  

“Good,” he breathes out, wants to see me as well. He’s grabbing at my hips, leans over and fits a hand over my shoulder.  

 

Brief moment of mild discomfort, immediately followed by psychologically stimulated rush of endorphins:  Gasp for breath, make incoherent noises, world narrowing down to our bodies pressing together.

John turning his head, breathing out harshly, pushing in.  

Perfect.

Wriggle my hips, arch upward, draw him in deeper.  John’s abortive effort at saying my name, only managing the, “ _Sh_ \--,” before cutting into a hiss as I pull him down farther to settle against the V of my legs.  

Wait.

Wait.

 

“John.”  

His eyes flaring open, raking up my chest, my mouth, my eyes.  Startlingly blue and open and readable.  He might as well be shouting out everything, I can watch him think.  It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.  Better than looking up in a lab in Saint Bart’s and seeing a short blonde army doctor with a psychosomatic limp in need of a flatmate.  I’m pretty sure I wanted him even then.  I never gave the unstable reactions attributed to immediate attraction much cop, until the attraction came and proceeded to stay.  

 

“John, did you know that Jay birds are entirely monogamous?  They mate for life.”  

John pushes his hips forward once, bends down and kisses me.  It requires a bit of contortion on both of our parts  My torso is long, John brings a leg up over the crest of his hip.  Our body types out of sync in a lovely way. Imperfections in physics making everything seem more solid and reassuring.  

“Is that you trying to tell me something extremely important through the medium of birds?”  He slides in and out again, slowly, allowing me more time to adjust.  (Don’t need it.)

Consider.  Wait.  John waits too.  

“Perhaps.”  Simple, pragmatic statement.  Safe.  “John.”

“Yeah?”

Wrap both legs around him, arms clasp around the crown of his shoulders, “You can move now.”

“ _Christ_.”

 

One hand on the headboard, one fisted into the bedclothes, John pulls nearly all the way out before surging back inward and we’re both invoking deities we don’t believe in.  

And it’s not ever been like this, not like _this_.

Where nothing is being taken from me.

There’s only the slide of flesh, fullness, the electric spark deep inside my belly, and John’s whispered praises against my skin as he angles his hips precisely.  He buries his face in my neck, licks and nips at my throat, begins sucking at the sensitive skin.  He grips my hair, and I let him bare my neck.  He wants a mark, just there, right against the freckles dotting the tendons.

 John is a possessive lover, I could laugh with the knowledge of it.  A love bite as a deterrent for other potential mates.  A blatant display indicating that John wants; wants me.  (Sudden burst of possible scenarios in which I could appeal to this proclivity.)

 

His hips snap against me more quickly as he worries the skin, and releases it.  Brushes his hand through my hair before wrapping it around my cock and stroking it in time with his thrusts, I nearly jolt him off of me.  Mind given over to the rapid spiral of bliss curling up inside of me.  Feel myself begin to strain and tremble. Say his name, say it again.  “ _Please_ ,”  slide my hands down to grip John’s bottom, pull him closer, harder, faster, John.

“Got you, _God_ , Sherlock,” John’s tempo quickens, stutters.

“Again, say it again,” I ask him, air filling my lungs, releasing it shakily, on the verge.  Wanting my name filling John’s mouth, reaffirmation, inhibitions thrown to the wind.  Don’t care if it’s ridiculous, or embarrassing.  

John gasps, presses forward, all of his muscles tightened, eyes screwed shut, face in the dip of my neck, whispers, “ _Sherlock_ ,” desperately in my ear as he begins to come.  I feel him pulse and twitch inside of me, his body rippling with the effort.  His hand on me stills, and I’m so close that it’s almost painful.  His thumb swipes lazily over the corona once, twice, and he strains his entire body against mine, the friction between the trap of our stomachs and his loosened fist is enough.  

I’m swearing, back arching only to attempt doubling forward immediately after.  John presses himself firmly against me, allowing me to jostle and ride out orgasm as he anchors my flailing extremities.

 

I feel my body relax gradually, the both of us melting into one another for the quiet, wonderful, span of 47 seconds.  John pulls away slowly, I hear him remove the condom, he reaches across me and bins it.  Fetches his shirt off the floor, wipes come from my chest.

 

He rolls next to me, and just watches.  Giving me enough space to breathe, making sure I won’t renege on my promise to not run like last time.  

 

I only turn, crawl on top of his body.  My elbow collides with his solar plexus lightly and he gives a small _oompf_! before I recalculate and settle comfortably, sprawled over him.

His fingers trace between my shoulder blades for several minutes before I clear my throat and begin to speak.

 

“When I was four my mother tried to overdose.  Nanny found her choking on vomit, passed out in bed.”  I begin, my voice quiet and low.  John freezes for an instant, then resumes swiping his hand comfortingly across my back.  

 

“Things got better for a few years afterward.  Then, it wasn’t.  Better, I mean.  Her medications seemed to stop working.  It was a choice between drug induced bouts of catatonia, or  melancholic catatonia.  She must have seen it coming.  Wanted to spare herself, us.  She was brilliant, and we watched her mind fall to bits.  Mycroft goes to visit her.  I haven’t in years.”  I take a few breaths, consider, “I’m odd.  I thought I might…”  I let the sentence taper and die in my mouth.   “I wouldn’t tolerate it either.  I imagine I’d react in the same way, rather than lose my acuity.”

“That won’t happen to you.”  John says urgently,dragging me up quickly and kissing me breathless.  “I’d never let you--” another firm kiss, “No.”

 

“I think she knew she was going mad.  It must have been horrible, knowing something like that and being unable to stop it.  I’m sure it didn’t help that father exacerbated her fragile state with his abuse.”

 

Once I begin talking I can’t stop.  The force of it beats it’s way out of me while I whisper memories against John’s chest.  I tell him about strawberry crepes and french lullabies.  The weeping willow tree where I buried a baby bird after he’d fallen from his nest during a spring gale.  I tell him the rest of the story about my Cat.  I feel his breath go a little ragged, and he sniffs sharply.  

 

There are happier things, and I tell John about them as well.  Mycroft teaching me calculus from his textbooks during train rides to London, giving me mint cremes for every correct answer.  I broke his TI-89 calculator trying to open and reassemble it.  How he helped me build a skiff during my piratical phase, I attempted to sail it across the duck pond and sank right down, Mycroft had swum out to help and a snapping turtle latched onto his ankle.  I had thought it was hilarious, right up until the point where one had nearly made a meal out of my toe as well.

 

“You were close, you and your brother.  What happened?”  John asks.  

He doesn’t hate Mycroft, but he certainly doesn’t want to sit in a sewing circle with him either.  Told me once that Mycroft was too different from me for John to particularly like him, and too reminiscent of me for John to actually hate him.  So mostly John found himself, “obligingly annoyed.”  I didn’t think it meant anything at the time, now I think I ought to have read into the subtlety of his phrasing.

 

“Years of silence, after father died.  I resented his success and his relative immunity to things that went on inside of our home. He resented my lack of decorum and everything that went along with it.  Perhaps, subconsciously, resented being thrust into the role of caretaker at an early age. ”  It was more than that.  It sounds so simple put into those terms.  It’s difficult for reconcile my regards for Mycroft.  He was my only friend for so long, very much like a parent.  Even an exceptional youth, such as Mycroft had been, might hold a grudge over their childhood being stolen from them.  He might have liked a choice in the matter.  

 

I talk about public school, being pinned against the lockers by two classmates while three others took turns pummeling me.  I managed to twist free at one point and broke someone’s nose and another one’s fingers, before being dragged to the ground and knocked unconscious.

 

“I didn’t understand why people would get so upset about the truth.  I was hardly telling them anything they didn’t already know.  They hated me even when I said nothing, so I stopped caring altogether. It only mattered whether I was right or not.”

 

“They hated you because you were smarter than the lot of them thrown together..  They weren’t offended.  They were jealous.”  John says with conviction before sticking his hamd into my hair.  He spreads his fingers in the spaces where my curls gap and loop, as if trying to measure their diameter.    “You’re brilliant, it’s your brain, it’s how you are.  And yeah, fine, a bit of an arse sometimes.  But you’re more than a little amazing, and frankly, I could listen to you wax poetic about the properties of plasma under hypothetical conditions, or subatomic whatchamacallits  for quite some time.  So smart. God.  It’s sexy.”  

Lean up, study John’s face, “You’re sexually aroused by the fact that I am intellectually superior to yourself.”

“Yeah.”  John nods simply, grins.

“Oh.  That’s--” reassuring, interesting, “Convenient.”

“It’s your default state.  I wouldn’t have you otherwise.”  More kissing, soft licks against my tongue.  “Tell me more.”

 

So I do.

Visits to my grandmother in France, the smell of snow falling on the bay.  Walking to the sea, wading to my knees and catching soft shell crabs.  A black haired girl from the village offering to kiss me, drunk off wine pilfered from her parent’s cellar, I declined the offer and she vomited on my shoes. A wise decision, after all.   John laughs, his breathy, shuddering laugh.  Honest and without awkwardness.  

 

Then, I tell John about father cornering me once against the garden shed and John doesn’t laugh anymore.

 

He had come from the kitchen after the coffee had grown cold and stale, had put his hands under my vest and touched my ribs like they belonged to him.  I had snagged my wrist on a rusty nail protruding from a loose beam of wood.  I talk about the smell of blood mixing with sweat and dust.  I was young, the whole incident had left me doddering and confused.  I tell him about father hunting with his colleagues, becoming blindingly drunk in the evenings after they’d come home empty handed.  I tell John about the way my door knob twisted and rattled, fighting to remain locked tight.  Hiding under my bed, my hands clasped over my ears.  

 

John stays silents, his fingers stilling, but he grasps onto me tightly, holds me so firmly that it compresses the air in my lungs, and it’s wonderful.

 

I tell John about being dragged by my hair out of bed, curling up on the floor and being kicked.  Accepting it, allowing it, would do anything to keep him away from mother.  The terribly confusing moment of being lifted up and tucked back in underneath the cool sheets.  I grab John’s hand, pull it down to the small of my back.

“He rubbed his hand there.   Never did anything overtly inappropriate, as far as touching me.  I think he was getting off, though.  I couldn’t delete it.  The noises, indicated..  But he never touched me.  Not like that.”  The words come out sloppy and bulky, ever only scenes replaying themselves in my mind.  

 

“You never told anyone.”  John says, all statement.

 

“No one would have believed me.  Aside from Mycroft.  Mother, even when she was coherent, lived in denial of any of his wrongdoings.  He was a pillar of the community.  He was good, for everyone else.”

John swipes his palm flat against the small of my back, runs his fingers down each notch of my vertebrae.  “Look at me,” he says.

 

I pick my cheek up from his chest, it’s sticky and sweaty from having been resting against him so long, but it’s hardly a concern.  I meet John’s eyes, he cups his hands over my ears, runs a caress over them from the heel of his palm all the way to the tip of his middle fingers.

“You realise none of that was your fault, right?”

 

“Of course, I don’t recall accepting the blame for anything.”  Yes, of course.  I think.  Sometimes.  It isn’t?  Father shrugging his inherent ugliness off of his shoulders, forcing it onto mine.  

“And you’re not anything like either of your parents.”  John concludes, eyes flicking back and forth between mine.  “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I think so, “All right, John.”

 

He brings our mouths together again, kisses me well and thoroughly, without pretense or agenda.  Presses his lips to mine, strokes my skin. Pulls me closer and sighs into my mouth.  Laughs when I drop my hips to rut against him.

“How are you not exhausted?” He scolds, but still grabs me by the hips, encouraging a proper alignment of our budding erections.

“Shared orgasm after potential partners discuss significant subject matter with one another, assists in the pair bonding process.”

He hums against my lips.  

 

The immediacy is still there, buzzing between us, but it’s not unbearable.  The urgent need to grasp, and mark, and claim, now manageable.  John writhes lazily underneath me, and I’m content to pant hot air against his lips, occasionally nip along his shoulder.

John’s fingers insinuate themselves between us, takes us both in hand.  

Mouths open, breathing into one another, grab John’s hair by the nape of his neck: Pull.  

Run my teeth along the lobe of his ear, flatten my tongue, lick against the tiny invisible hair follicles:  Suck lightly.  

John pushes his forehead into my shoulder, groans quietly, our thrusts becoming momentarily out of sync.

“God-- feels-- _ah_.”  Cup my hand around the base of his neck, press down.  Not enough to restrict his oxygen, but the implication is there.  My constant representation of potential danger that John has always appreciated.

Retreat down his body, grabbing his wrist in the process, place it in my hair.

 

“Don’t push hard.” I hated it when Victor pushed.

“What?” John gasps, suddenly aware of my new (and obvious) position.

“Don’t push, pay attention,” Next time, I mean.

 

Form the tip of my tongue into a small cup, cover the head of his penis with my mouth.  Try to keep everything soft and wet the way John had done.  (My general experience in this area based solely on serving as an alternative orifice.)

“Sherlock,” John breathes out my name, fingers tightening minutely then releasing where they’re nestled against the crown of my skull.  I pull off, release a puff of air over where my saliva glistens.  John shivers.  The tremor running through his muscles, his eyes locked onto me as I wrap my lips around him again, it all feels terribly intimate.  It pools at the center of my chest, filling in hollow spaces, bringing comfort to my incessant need.  Closeness, familiarity, mutuality.

 

Swallow around him, gliding suck, and I make a popping sound when I pull off.  (On purpose.  John knows, rolls his eyes, throws his head backward onto the pillow.)

“Just-- You just-- _ungh_ \--” incomplete thought.

 

I flatten my tongue and run it up to caress against the fraenulum.  Go back to long, travelling sucks.  Swirl my tongue around the tip, lick softly into the slit.  A familiar bitter salt taste made more compelling by the  fact that it’s John’s.

“ _Sherl--_ ”  feel John’s fingers grip my hair.  He doesn’t push, just holds on and follows the bob of my head.  (Incredible, watching John fall apart this way.) “I--”  he’s trying to warn me politely, and I keep pace.

“Going to--”

I know, John.  I can feel your diaphragm expand and contract under my hand, testicles drawing up in preparation of orgasm, an abrupt, shuddering breath inhaled. I lick against his skin, keep my teeth out of the equation.  His hips thrust up softly, largely an autonomic response, his body chasing imminent climax.

“Sorry, God--” managing to apologise even as his eyes screw shut, and his next sound is a string of creative curses and soft vowels.  I’m swallowing around him as he comes.  The slightly odd texture of semen, hot and sharp on my tongue, rapidly diluted as it’s swallowed away and replaced by the sudden influx of my saliva.  I pull off, look deliberately up at John and lick away a few stray drops of come.

 

“C’mere--” John grasps me by the nape of my neck and tugs, “ _Fuck_ , just let me touch you,” and _yes_ , please, _that_.

I climb up his body, he kisses me, reaches down and takes me in hand.  I moan into his mouth.  It doesn’t take long at all, a few swift strokes and I’m burying my face in his neck making desperate sounds, abdominal muscles clenching, and I’m coming for the second time today.  Digging fingers into the light golden tone of John’s skin, breathing roughly against his throat, thighs trembling as John reaches for the already soiled t-shirt and cleans the mess away before my legs give out and I collapse back on top of him.  (John shaped pillow.)  Our bodies are hot, nearly stifling, but he doesn’t complain and I still wouldn’t move if he did.  

 

The light in the room is a thin bisque where sunshine filters through.  I feel each individual point of contact of John’s fingertips dipped into the carve of my spine.  The steady pump of his heart against my sternum. I trace individual bones, a calcification on the anterior portion of the tenth false rib, a fracture healed over years ago.  He laughs a little.

“Harry hit me with a cricket bat after I’d stuck chewing gum in her fringe.”  He murmurs sleepily.

I smile against his chest, feel his lungs expand with air as he yawns, brushes a lazy kiss into the nest of my hair.  

 

John falls asleep quickly, mouth open slightly taking in soft breaths.  I watch him for a long time. His trigger finger pinching the skin over my bicep when he begins dreaming about firefights and hot sand under desert boots.  Brush my fingers along his cheek until he presses subconsciously into my hand, and I’ve not ever felt so intact.

 

I cling to John’s body and hold there.  Something escapes me like a remnant of shadow, like a sense of vacancy.  Some thing that I had tried to forget, yet always understood in a way that reached unambiguously into my bones, always a weight in the hollow between my ribs.  Loneliness scabbing over, my resignation and detachment being boiled away in the arms of another person.  Existential folly.  (John would approve.)  I swallow around the nothing inside of my throat, overcome with it.  Happiness.

Didn’t know it made you weep, too.

 

I’ve never loved hard enough to be loved back.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, if you've made it reading this far! (Angst and all!) I was originally going to form an epilogue, but I decided against it. Wanted to leave the end open for all the potential. I look forward to comments and writing another multi-chapter work, very soon!


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